Fistful of Thorns
by raining-down-hearts
Summary: Ino Yamanaka usually claims to be perfect, but some recent mistakes have put her in situations that she absolutely hates, and her clan's displeasure with her isn't making life any easier, nor is living alone for the very first time. She decides to get stronger, but it's a much longer, rougher journey than she'd ever thought it would be.
1. Chapter 1

If Ino Yamanaka was anything at all, she was her father's daughter.

Of course they looked alike, and they both rather enjoyed playing puppet master with the possessed bodies of careless enemies, but beyond that, they shared a talent for simply reading people. Inoichi had taught his daughter the unseen language that lay in curled fingers, sideways glances, flushed cheeks. She knew which direction a person was most likely to look while searching for a lie, and what stance someone would take if they were feeling uncomfortable or threatened. She could spend five seconds eyeballing a person and, nine times out of ten, even with highly trained shinobi, she'd know exactly what they were feeling in that moment; she'd gotten so good over the years that even Tsunade wouldn't bet against her anymore.

But right now, as she looked at Sakura, who was standing shivering in her doorway with dripping pink hair and clenched fists, tracking mud all over her rug without the slightest care, Ino had no idea what was going on in her best friend's head. All she knew was that it was bad.

So for once, she clamped her mouth shut around all the worried babble that wanted to pour out, guided Sakura by the elbow onto the couch, tossed a blanket around her, and with a soft pat on the shoulder, retreated into the kitchen to make tea.

She brought out two steaming cups a few minutes later; Sakura was in the exact same position, motionless, hunched over with her head in her hands and looking very forlorn. Considering Sakura and that ridiculous runaway temper she had, 'forlorn' was probably a worse sign than 'rampaging out of control' would have been.

Well, Sakura sulking wouldn't do at all. The last thing that giant forehead needed was wrinkles. "I can't help you if you don't tell me what's wrong," Ino said briskly, sticking a finger in the collar of Sakura's vest and hauling her upright before shoving the cup of tea into her hands. Now that Ino looked, she could see all the signs that told her Sakura hadn't even gone home yet from the mission she'd left for last Friday. She'd probably come straight here from the gates- she was filthy, the kunai holster around her thigh was empty, and if Ino fished for it, her chakra signature was faint and fatigued. Poor girl, for her to rush right here, after a week-long mission- she was really shaken up.

Sakura blinked, quite as if she hadn't the foggiest idea where she was, then jumped as thunder cracked outside the window of Ino's apartment. "Shit," she squeaked, setting the cup down hard before she spilled any more.

"Elaborate," Ino commanded, sitting on the couch beside her friend.

Sakura still had that face on, unreadable, tight and wound, but her voice was so shrill and terrified that it gave away everything Ino couldn't read. "Sasuke's back," Sakura whispered, two little words, but they were enough to make Ino promptly leap to her feet in a violent fit of painful emotion and fling her teacup at the wall.

"Where is he? I'm going to kill him! I'm going to- what did he do to you? Why are you so upset? Is he in prison? Who brought him back? Is he still hot? What an ass! After four fucking years- that dirty traitor!" She was gasping. Sasuke, dark eyes, blue lightning and blood- and it had been so, so long, and she'd held Sakura for so many painful nights after the hunt for him had broken her.

"He's not back, back," Sakura muttered, shoving her dripping bangs out of her eyes and reaching for her cup as if she rather wanted something to do with her hands. "He's- it- we saw him this morning, coming home from our mission. Sixty miles north of here."

Ino squinted at nothing, making a mental map, then said, "Right by the border of Sound, then." It made sense. The Village Hidden in the Sound was purely Orochimaru's territory. Still, sixty miles was within Fire Country territory by a good margin, and if Sasuke didn't want to be seen, he wouldn't have been- it was just too much to imagine him being taken by surprise, not by ninja who were traveling in familiar turf and thus not bothering to be extra stealthy. What the hell was that bastard up to now?

Sakura only nodded and peered into her tea, pressing her lips together very tightly and not saying anything else. She was still shivering, but the blanket and the beverage were helping a little, and the wildness was receding from her face. Ino got up, trotted to the bathroom, brought back a towel, and unwound Sakura's soaked hitai-ate from her hair so she could start drying it. Sakura bore it, though usually she would've snapped at Ino by now for being overbearing.

"So. Forehead. What'd the boys do? What'd Sasuke do?"

Sure enough, 'Forehead' made Sakura growl a little. That was good, though. More normal. Ino just kept patiently toweling her friend's hair, and after a bit, Sakura said, "He just sort of looked at us. Like he didn't even know us, god, he was so cold- Naruto went totally crazy, of course. Kakashi and I had to grab him."

"Isn't there a standing order to bring Sasuke back, though?"

"Duh," Sakura said sharply, brooding over her tea. Ino smiled at the back of her friend's head; now that was more like it. "We were all really low on chakra. Even Naruto was tired. And Sai was unconscious. Kunai to the lung and I couldn't fully heal him after our last fight, I was drained. We just ran. Sa- Sasuke didn't chase us. We couldn't have-" She set the cup down and gripped her knees, white-knuckled.

Ino knew, with stingingly painful familiarity, all the words that Sakura had bitten off without saying- not good enough, not strong enough, not enough- and if there was ever a time for a stupid distraction, now was that time. "Poor, poor Sai. Is he okay? That pretty face of his wasn't hurt, was it? You know, I oughta tell him how much I appreciate that shirt he wears." There, that was both a subtle insult to Sakura's healing abilities and a change in subject, the perfect misdirection. Sakura turned her head to stare incredulously as Ino tossed the towel onto a chair and hopped over the back of the couch onto the cushions; Ino just beamed and waggled her eyebrows. "What? I like a man that shows off his six-pack without making me work for it."

"God, Pig, if you touch that poor idiot I'll smack you into next month! You'll confuse the hell out of him! And yes, he'll be fine. Not that my teammates are any of your business."

Ino held up both hands, laughing. "I was only talking about looking, but hey, now that you brought up touching- ow! Dammit, Forehead, that hurts! You better call your parents and tell them where you're at. I know they'll be grateful to hear you're with me. They never give up hope that I can change you into a proper lady- ouch!"

They spend the rest of the night eating chocolate and very carefully not talking about Sasuke, or Sound, or evil backstabbing heartbreakers with really great hair, and after a while Ino got Sakura in the shower and then safely tucked up on the couch. The poor girl was snoring like a wild hog within a second of her head hitting the pillow- and she called Ino the pig!

"Irony," Ino told nobody, pulling the blankets up a little tighter around Sakura and flicking out the lights before retreating to her bedroom.

She couldn't seem to sleep, though. She ended up staring at her stained ceiling, worrying and stewing, listening to the rain patter down outside, and wondering vaguely when Sakura had gotten so much stronger, because if it had been Ino suddenly staring down Sasuke, she'd still be bawling.

* * *

In the morning, Sakura was gone, but she'd made coffee, thank god, and Ino got herself a thermos full before going hunting.

Through judicious application of her finely honed stealth and tracking techniques, she found Naruto almost immediately. "You!" she hollered, diving onto a barstool beside him. "I've been looking everywhere for you!"

He blinked big blue eyes at her, ramen hanging halfway out of his mouth, before slurping it up and saying, "But I'm always at Ichiraku's for breakfast, Ino. Everyone knows that."

She pouted at him, feeling sleep deprived and mildly dangerous. "Please. I had to use all my-"

"Stealth and tracking techniques?" someone said, sliding in to sit next to her.

She whirled on the interloper, clutching her coffee. "Cho!"

Chouji grinned at her and raised an eyebrow. "It's okay, Ino. We know you're damn good if you can find Naruto. It's not like he lives here or anything."

What a brat. "Shut up," she hissed before turning back to Naruto. She was worried enough about Sakura to ignore Cho's smart mouth. "Spill it. Forehead showed up at my door last night practically dead on her feet. I had to valiantly nurse her back to health and sanity, I lost beauty sleep because of it, and therefore you are going to tell me what exactly went on at the border of Sound!"

Naruto sidled away from her a little, looking wary, hugging his ramen bowl. "What did she tell you?"

Ino shrugged and examined her nails. "That you ran into Sasuke. That he was an asshole. That your team had to pull out without engaging him due to the mission you'd just completed. That you just about lost it." She leaned a little closer and smiled with all her teeth; Naruto gulped, looking satisfyingly afraid. "But I'm not stupid. Something else happened. Seeing Sasuke would shake her up, sure, but not as bad as she was." Silently, a little bitterly, Ino added in her own head: not with how tough Sakura's becoming.

"Oh." Naruto looked deeply befuddled. Chouji snorted and shook his head. "Oh! Wait! I guess it would be what he said!"

"She said he didn't say anything."

"Well-" Naruto's usually cheerful face darkened. Oddly enough, he managed to be a little intimidating right then, even slumped over on a wobbly stool with a noodle in his hair. "He didn't, exactly. He just sort of looked at us, and then he laughed."

"He laughed?" said Ino, aghast. No wonder Sakura had been so upset.

"He laughed!" Chouji repeated. "No way. What a jerk."

Naruto and Ino nodded in fervent accord. "You're not yelling at me or anything, it's sorta weird," Naruto pointed out to Ino a moment later. "Is that all you wanted to know?"

Ino said nothing, but when Chouji craned his neck around to get a glimpse of her face, he shuddered. "She's plotting horrible, humiliating revenge on Uchiha. I know that look." He slid off his stool and started edging over to the exit. "I'm just, uh- bye, Naruto! Later, Ino."

Naruto just shrugged and returned to his breakfast. Ino stayed starry-eyed and vicious for a few more minutes, dreaming about shaving Sasuke bald, or maybe putting a dog collar on him and letting Sakura lead him around the village, then she returned to reality with a start. It took her a moment to notice the scroll Chouji had left on her lap.

"Ooh. Mission!" she trilled happily, recognizing the pale green wax seal stamped with a delicate leaf. She was always glad for a mission these days; living on her own had been a lot more expensive than she'd really realized. Anxiety made her frown for a moment. Didn't she have a bill of some sort due today? When she couldn't quite remember, the anxiety got worse as she stared at the scroll, until she felt both hot and cold and rather as if she might cry. She ignored it and reminded herself that she had Sakura's problems to investigate, now a mission, split ends to trim at some point today and also she needed to shave her legs before leaving and pack and- she lounged carefully against Ichiraku's counter and made sure she looked every inch of calm and competent, putting her stupid worries aside for the moment in the face of Sakura's more important problems.

"Lucky," Naruto slurred moodily from around a truly tremendous mouthful of ramen.

She shook her head hard. This was no time to get emotional, not when any of her mother's dratted spies could be watching her, ready to report back to the clan with any sign of weakness. "You just got back from one that put Sai in the hospital," Ino pointed out, sliding a fingernail under the seal and popping the scroll open. "You should be happy for a little downtime."

Naruto goggled at her. "Why do you always know everything about everything? Do you read minds all the time? Are you reading- oh, shit, are you reading my mind right now? Wait, no, that's kind of cool. What am I thinking right now?" He shut his eyelids tight and waited.

Ino muffled an indelicate guffaw and said, "Sakura, Sasuke, and ramen. Not necessarily in that order. Am I right?"

Naruto's eyes popped open and he regarded her with a look of absolute wonder. "Holy crap!"

She sniffed in satisfaction and unrolled the scroll. Three lines in, her stomach was in knots. A C-ranked mission of indefinite length, just her and Chouji, leaving tonight, to the Land of Waves- directly in the opposite direction of where Sasuke was right now.

She must have sighed, or something, because Naruto stuck his spiky blond mop right in her face to read the mission notice. "Hey! Get off!" she yelped, shoving.

He only grimaced sympathetically. "South, huh?"

Ino debated answering at all, but finally she said, with sadness that both surprised and irritated her, "Yeah. South." How humiliating, for her to be so transparent that even this ramen-addled idiot could read her so clearly. She realized she was fidgeting with a strand of her ponytail and forced herself to stop. She really should know better than to show her hand so blatantly.

"And Dumbass is north." He patted her on the shoulder gently, and she didn't even have the gumption to slap his hand away. "Sorry, Ino, but it's probably for the best."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" she snarled, leaping to her feet and jabbing him in the chest, gumption fully returned and then some.

"I- you- just-" He floundered. "I just meant that Sasuke's really scary now, okay? Like seriously scary!"

He was lying, or at least, that wasn't what he'd meant. It was written all over him and she could have seen it even if she weren't a Yamanaka. "I'll show you scary," she seethed, but then she looked at the scroll again and her fire went out. "Whatever. I can and will make you regret being born, Naruto, so don't mess with me. See you later. And take care of Sakura!" With that, she headed home.

Shikamaru, of all people, was lounging in the hall beside her apartment door, digging the toe of his boot into a shredded patch of the dingy carpet. "Hey there." He waved slowly at her, unusually friendly, a bad sign.

"Hey, Shika." She knew exactly why he was here and she wasn't going to have it. It was time he butted out of her business. She decided to fight fire with fire and latched onto his arm, cooing, "So how are things with little Miss 'Just Friends' Temari? And how's working for the Hokage going? I'm just so proud of you, Shika! I want to hear everything that's been going on with you!" She unlocked her door and shoved him inside. "It's been way too long since we sat down and had a really good talk!"

He only stared at her, hands in his pockets. "Knock it off," he said eventually. "Is everything going okay? How's your dad been treating you?"

Ino definitely did not flinch. She gritted her teeth to get past the screaming red that flooded her vision and said acidly, "He and I go on picnics together and embroider my wedding kimono. How the hell do you think he's treating me?"

She slammed her door behind him, locked it out of habit, and headed into her bedroom, tossing her battered old backpack onto the bed and diving into her closet. Shikamaru just followed, infuriatingly unperturbed, and she slit her eyes at him. How dare he bring up her stupid clan right now, right before a mission- and she knew that he knew she'd been issued one, too, he was always helping Tsunade write out the mission rosters when she was too hungover to hold a pen. Really Ino should just stomp him and his stupid jounin vest right into the dirt.

But then, her shoes were way too cute to ruin with Shikamaru blood, so for the moment she contented herself with tossing vile looks his way as she crammed clothing and shuriken and toothpaste and razor wire into her pack.

He wandered over the the bed and sat down, yawning until his jaw cracked. "So how's it going, livin' alone?"

Ino said nothing.

He persevered. "Ino."

It was a tone she knew all too well, so she sighed and turned to him, planting her fists on her hips. "What? What do you possibly want me to say? What, Shika? Are you going to swoop in and save poor little me from the monsters under my bed? There isn't a damn thing I can do! You're clan too, you know exactly how this mess is going to play out for me, so quit bringing it up when I'm trying to forget and move on already!" By the end of her rant, she was practically shouting, but she didn't care.

Shikamaru looked angry, though- well, mildly irritated, his equivalent of snarling mad. "I don't try to save you," he pointed out. "You scream at me whenever I do."

Ino sniffed. "Serves you right. We're a team!"

He regarded her solemnly, fingers rubbing together in the way that mean he really, really wanted a cigarette. "I know we're a team." Then he went in for the kill. "That's why Chouji and I are so worried about you."

Ino stared at him. "Typical you. Turn my own words against me."

"We are a team," he reminded her.

This couldn't be tolerated. Her life was her own, and she was trying her damnedest to keep it that way. It was time for revenge. Ino strolled over to her dresser and started idly rummaging through her panty drawer, holding up each lacy little bit of nothing consideringly before throwing them in the direction of her pack. If one particularly scanty purple number just so happened to miss and float down into Shikamaru's lap, well, that was just too bad.

He turned vaguely red and deposited them in her pack with thumb and forefinger, looking displeased. Good. She sauntered over and smirked at him. "Do you have a problem with seeing a women's delicates?"

"Nothing about you is delicate," he grumbled.

"Terrible answer."

"I'm serious, though, Ino." She stomped her foot and turned to leave, or possibly grab something to throw at him, but he reached out and snagged her wrist. He wasn't being rough with her, but his grip was firm, and when she looked at him, his eyes were very dark. "I know you. I know you put up this big wall of dumb blonde and gossip to keep people out of your business. It's stupid and I'm tired of it and I won't have you keeping secrets from your team when we could help you. Maybe my dad could talk to yours, or Cho's, you know? They're friends, it might help."

Both her teammate's father's had already tried talking to her own, and she was entirely shocked that Shikamaru didn't know that, because he knew everything. She shut her eyes, exhaled slowly, and wrenched her wrist free. "Shika, it gives me great joy to inform you that you couldn't be more wrong. Now get out. I've got a mission to get ready for."

He didn't move a muscle. "I'm never wrong."

"You're wrong about this," she said firmly, flapping her hands at him until he lurched to his feet and started strolling towards her door. "I suppose Chouji's going to pull this same interfering nonsense with me, isn't he?"

Shikamaru shrugged, stepping out into the hallway. "Yeah, probably."

"Ugh!" Ino slammed the door in his face and stomped back to her bedroom. She did love her boys, god knew she'd die for them, but sometimes she'd much rather kill them.

Though it was rather sweet of them to worry. Irritating, yes, but sweet- and now she'd gone and lied to Shikamaru. Ino flopped down on her bed, fished her teddy bear Mr. Fofo out from under her pillows- she kept the thing hidden, because if anyone found out, her reputation would be absolutely ruined- and curled into a ball, kicking her overstuffed backpack onto the floor. She might as well try and get some sleep before leaving on the mission tonight.

Had she really lied to Shikamaru, though? Because Ino-Shika-Cho didn't lie, had never lied, would never lie. But she was handling it, and she would stick by her decision, and the Yamanaka clan would be just fine in the end, which meant she didn't need help at all. So she hadn't lied, not totally. She'd just- massaged the truth a little.

She kicked off her boots, wriggled under the covers, and sniffled into Mr. Fofo's well worn nose. She really did hate fighting with her family, and she hated almost-lying to her team even more, but as far as she could see, she didn't really have a choice. She'd made her decision, and she didn't regret it one bit.

Except she really, really did, and she missed her mom's home cooking and her old bedroom and her cat, and even though she could repeat to herself until she was blue in the face that she'd had no other options, it didn't make the emptiness in her chest go away.

* * *

Chouji was right on time to meet her at the gate, as always, and Ino pushed off the wall she'd been leaning on to join him. They signed out, waved to the chuunin guarding the gates, then headed into the trees, and slowly the glow and bustle of nighttime Konoha faded behind them, dissolving into crickets and the gentle rustle of leaves. Ino took a deep breath, smelling the fruity sweetness of lemon mint in the cool air. She'd have to remember where that was and collect some on the way home. It was ridiculously yummy in iced tea.

"So my dad says maybe I can try out for next year's jounin exams," Chouji said after a while, ambling next to her.

Family. He'd brought up family, with all the lead-footed subtlety of a bull in a teashop. God, here it came, and she'd be damned if she'd sit back and take it. So she whirled on him and started shrieking, somewhat involuntarily, completely carried away in a manner that was fast becoming too familiar. "I'm fine! I'm fine! Everything's fine! I love my apartment, I don't give a shit about stupid clan politics, and I'm fine! Fine! Do you freaking understand?"

Immediately, she felt terrible. But sweet Chouji just blinked at her, took a moment to work through her shouts, and then nodded serenely. "Oh. Okay. Good, then." He pushed chakra to his feet and was off into the trees a moment later, and she followed, silently grateful for how well he could read her.

Well, when he wasn't eyeballs deep in a bag of chips, anyway. At least he'd mostly stopped eating them while on missions. After getting caught in a pretty nasty genjustu a while ago after an enemy followed the trail of crumbs he'd left to their campsite, he'd learned a bit of self-control.

Ino readjusted her pack on her shoulders and wove a slim braid of chakra into her eyes, twining it around the main optic nerve, to sharpen her night vision as they worked through the thick trees; it was a trick she'd stolen from Tenten, who'd stolen it from Sakura, who'd learnt it from Tsunade. Of course Ino probably could have just asked Sakura outright for a lesson, but how humiliating would that have been? The day she bowed her head and asked Sakura Haruno for help was the day she gave up on life and dyed her hair brown.

It was a long trip that night, and a quiet one, because for once she didn't really feel like talking, especially after the nauseating realization that she'd forgotten to pay her damn electricity bill before leaving, so they just kept moving. Around two in the morning, once they reached the edge of the Konoha forest, they hit the ground and settled into the deceptively distance-devouring shuffle-jog that any ninja worth their salt could keep up for days- probably months, if you were mutants like Gai or Rock Lee. Secretly Ino loved it, even if she did get all sweaty; it made her feel powerful, like a wolf, eating up the miles, and at night like this it was even better, cool and calm.

But morning came; at around nine o'clock it was starting to get warm, and the stupid sun had ruined all her fun, so eventually she nudged Chouji with her elbow and panted, "Stop for food?"

"Oh thank god," he responded immediately, skidding to a halt so fast that he threw up dust. "I was totally dying."

She regarded him with zero amusement. If he thought she'd fall for such an obvious ploy to boost her self-esteem, to make her think that he'd only just been keeping up with her or some such nonsense, he was dead wrong, and the words had Shikamaru all over them, but he flashed her such a nervous grin that she contented herself with merely rolling her eyes instead of smacking him. "Right. Sure. I'm sweaty and awful so I'm going to go leap into the creek I hear thataway-" She pointed- "And since you're such a wonderful teammate who I know hasn't been sneaking peeks at my ass, you're going to sit under that tree and make us breakfast, aren't you?"

Poor, dear, obvious Chouji. He promptly turned several impressive shades of red, gaped like a fish, then hung his head and moved to do her bidding.

The river she'd heard in the distance turned out to only be a quarter of a mile away, and it was totally fantastic. They were in the middle of nowhere, smack dab in the rolling farming country of southern Fire, which meant she didn't have to worry about any perverts trying to sneak up on her, and the water was comfortingly cold and fresh on her skin. Basically, she was in heaven for ten blissful minutes, soaking away the ache in her overworked muscles and watching tiny fish flit around her toes. It was a sort of relaxation she hadn't felt in seemingly forever.

At least until she heard Chouji shouting something. Her heart leapt painfully into her throat. Chouji- alone, she'd left him alone, fuck.

She practically flew back to where she'd left him, kunai in hand, and it wasn't until she stood before him dripping and irate that she realized she was barefoot in only her wet panties and bindings, her clothing left abandoned at the riverside. "Shit!" she snarled; there wasn't a soul but her moronic teammate in sight. "What on earth are you shouting about, nothing's wrong?" He was staring determinedly off over her shoulder, eyes wide. "Idiot," she added, because every single damn time something had gone wrong on a mission this early for her, invariably the rest of that mission would be a clusterfuck, too. She was jinxed, and if this mission went wrong, she'd be short on rent. Muted terror made her sharp. "Chouji, goddammit!"

He still refused to look at her, but his cheeks were pale beneath his scarlet swirls. "I forgot to bring any rations," he whispered, and then he sat right down in the dry dirt as if he'd given up entirely on living.

Ino dissolved into shrieking, flailing abuse for several satisfying minutes, and then she joined him on the ground, head in her hands. "I'm so hungry," she mourned as her stomach growled.

Chouji, sounding choked up, said remorsefully, "Me too. I'm so sorry, Ino, I always double check everything, I have no idea how this happened. This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me... it's like I'm a genin all over again or something!"

She sighed. He really did sound sorry, and anyway, lack of food was, for Chouji, a worse punishment than anything she could come up with at the moment, creative though she was, so she patted him on one husky forearm and said pragmatically, "Mistakes happen. Let me go get dressed and we'll find a town somewhere to eat at. I have-" she swallowed painfully, then lied through her teeth, "-some money to spare, I'll get us rations." He'd be in so much misery if he didn't eat.

He was so taken aback by that that he did manage to look at her for a few seconds. "What? But- Ino- I mean, I didn't bring any cash, I figured- and you have rent to pay now-"

She knew. It was only luck that she had any cash on her at all; jounins were expected to be able to live off the land or otherwise complete their missions without outside help, generally; it wasn't routine procedure to bring any funds on the average mission. She pasted on the carefree smile her father had taught her and flapped a hand. "I've got enough in the bank to buy us food, and I know you've been squirreling away all your pay like a crazy person for the past month for some big secret reason, so don't worry about it, okay?"

He turned rather pink and started rubbing his large hands together. "I wanna take Airi out on a date, but I wanna take her somewhere really nice," he blurted.

"Airi? The waitress from the barbeque joint?" Holy crap. Chouji had the strangest taste in women. Airi was a teeny little thing, as meek and quiet as a mouse. Next to Chouji she'd look like a hungry toothpick.

"Yeah. I wanna take her to Umi."

The last vestiges of anger melted right off Ino's secretly romantic heart. "Aww! That's the nicest restaurant in town!" she gushed. "She'll love it!" Inside she was as proud as a mother hen. All her nagging and prodding had finally paid off, and at least one of her boys was growing up into quite the gentleman. It gave her a serious case of the warm fuzzies. Maybe there was no hope for Shika, but she'd done her duty by Chouji. Anyway, Temari would whip Shikamaru into shape eventually.

He shrugged and started fidgeting with his headband, but he looked pleased. "I hope so. Uh- you- you had better get dressed, Ino."

"Oh, right. Since you made me think you were being ambushed I just jumped out of the river and ran here! Okay, I'll be back in a few." She jogged off, wanting to at least jump in one more time and wet her hair again before they moved on: Fire Country even in the springtime was brutally hot, and it was turning into summer right before her eyes now. The sound of the river was musical, and she practically sprinted the last little way-

And then she stopped dead, jaw hanging open and dismay curdling her stomach.

The only remnant of her clothing was her skirt, soaked and barely hanging onto the edge of the rock where she'd dumped everything; as she watched in dumbfounded horror, the current caught it up the rest of the way and off it floated, telling her exactly where the rest of her gear had gone. Her shorts, her shirt, her favorite boots, and worst of all, her hitai-ate were gone. She waded in after her skirt once she came to her senses, but it had disappeared somewhere in the time she'd spend gawking, and, aghast, she could feel tears stinging in her eyes. The clothing wasn't that big of a deal. She had a spare outfit in her pack, back with Chouji. The problem was that if they were going to make make it to Wave on time and yet still stop for rations, they really needed to get moving. They didn't have time to spend hours dragging a river for a lost hitai-ate.

A hitai-ate that would eat up all of the paycheck for this mission and then some to replace.

* * *

Chouji was fairly certain he was either going to die spontaneously at any moment, or Ino was just going to kill him.

If he died, probably there were worse ways to go than a heart attack brought on by a voluptuous teammate who was stomping down the road, jiggling dangerously, in nothing but black boyshort panties and bindings. If she decided to outright murder him as an outlet for her rage, though, he had no doubt it would be brutal and painful.

"Are you sure you don't want one of my shirts-" he tried cautiously, for the tenth time.

"No," she hissed, whipping around to glare at him so fast that her ponytail went right around her head to smack her cheek. "No! This is my own fault for being a careless idiot! And I don't want to wear your crumb-covered clothes anyway! I'd rather go naked than march into a town wearing something so ugly!"

Chouji stayed prudently silent after that, but the stiffening of her shoulders told him she was well aware of how unbelievably irrational he thought she was being. Yet he kept his mouth shut. She'd calm down eventually and get over herself- it was just always so annoying, waiting for her to stop being moody. He wasn't even stupid enough to protest when she marched straight into the first town they came across, head held high, ignoring all the people gawking at her. One boy actually walked face-first into a wall, which was entertaining, but overall she just ignored them all. Chouji followed, wondering alternately how many years it had been since he'd gone a whole night and day without eating and whether or not the entire mission would be this awful.

Then she paused, squinted, and hauled him by the elbow into an alley that smelled of garbage and mold. "We need a plan," she said in a low voice.

Of course they needed a plan. They were ninja. Plotting was their thing. But knowing Ino, she already had something devious and underhanded cooked up, so he just said compliantly, "Okay?"

"I'm going to go into this bar and get us some money-" she pounded a fist on the wall beside them- "And you're going to wait here."

"A bar. How- how are you going to get money in bar?" he said uneasily.

She smirked, and out of long experience, he took a step back. "Please! I'm a kunoichi. They're civilian idiots who'll be blinded the moment I walk in there. Give me maybe an hour and I'll be back, we can get rations and clothes, and then we can push on."

"I- what- I can't just let you go into some bar all alone dressed like- not dressed!" Chouji said in horror.

She narrowed her eyes at him and crossed her arms. "I didn't do this on purpose! You and I both know that my changes of clothes mysteriously disappearing from my pack before I left home last night was the work of that moron dog-boy Kiba. I'm going to kill him when we get back, slowly and painfully, I'm gonna get Tsunade to bring him back to life and them I'm going to kill him again, and if you ever want to finish this stupid mission and get home you'll just shut up and let me handle this! Okay?"

Chouji was lost. Lost and starving to death. He frowned down at Ino's bare, filthy feet. "Kiba?"

"Last week I put pink dye in Akamaru's shampoo," she muttered, flushing. "It was revenge for- well, it- a thing. Anyway. So obviously it was him who took my clothes." She made a face. "Which means he was in my apartment. God, I really need to start setting better traps. Anyway! This is my fault, so let me handle it. I'll be fine, trust me."

Ino never, ever, ever admitted that anything was her fault, not even if she was literally caught red-handed mid-crime. It was a point of pride with her, so why did she look so hangdog and worried right now? Honestly, knowing her, he would've assumed an excuse to prance around half-naked would be right up her alley. She did enjoy being the center of attention. "You're underage," he pointed out, quite reasonably, he thought, but she only looked more irritated.

"I don't look underage!" She had him there. He very carefully did not look at her chest. "Chouji, we don't really have a choice, okay, and I really need the money for this mission!" With that she turned on her heel and stormed off.

Well. Chouji gathered up every last piece of discipline and courage he possessed so he could ignore the ferocious gurgling of his tragically empty stomach and crouched down to peer into one of the cloudy little windows of the bar, which was below the level of the street, apparently a renovated basement of sorts, or something. Someone had to have her back, after all. He wished, for the hundredth time, that he hadn't forgotten their rations. Missing breakfast had already had a bit of a negative effect on his chakra reserves, and he felt out of sorts.

Peeking in through the cobwebby window, it looked just like a normal bar to him, fairly empty this time of the afternoon, with a few guys playing pool and the rest just sitting around drinking. He squinted, grumbled under his breath, and discreetly used his sleeve to wipe the dirty glass of the window a bit, just in time to see Ino slither in.

He couldn't hear her, of course, but he didn't really need to hear to know that every single sound in the bar had stopped.

She said something, smiled widely, and then crooked a finger at one of the guys playing pool, a lanky redhead; the guy's jaw fell open, but then he grinned in a way Chouji really didn't like. Even dirty and ragged after hours of travel, even barefoot, the darn girl instantly had the whole bar practically eating out of her hand.

Sure, he could see her wrangling a few free drinks, but how the hell was she going to get money?

He kept watching.

Ino said something else, did a wriggle with her hips that made Chouji lightheaded for a second, and then she shook hands with the redhead and went to sit on the pool table. The guy laughed visibly, shaking his head, and then he went over to the wall and did something Chouji couldn't quite see before walking to stand by Ino.

Oh. Darts. Darts?

Ah.

Chouji kept watch, just in case things went south, but it was almost tragic how quickly Ino, with all her years of training, beat the pants off practically every guy in the bar and then walked out beaming at them, clutching fistfuls of money that they'd been foolish enough to bet against her. To add insult to injury, she stood there for a moment, tucking the cash into her bindings before giving the gaping men a jaunty wave and leaving.

"Chouuuu-ji!" she sang out, obviously quite pleased with herself. He was already by the end of the alley waiting for her.

"They looked mad," he informed her. "We probably want to buy everything quick."

"It takes time for a woman to find the perfect outfit, Cho, you can't rush beauty," she grinned, but then, so suddenly that he barely recognized her, she sobered, golden brows crinkling in the sort of serious expression she didn't wear very often. It almost looked like stress. "Well. Here." She dug around in her bindings for a moment, to his embarassed dismay, and handed him a handful of crinkled money. "You get rations, you'll know what's got the most nutrition for the best price. I'll get boots and whatever cheap clothes I can find and meet you back at the road in twenty minutes?"

"Sure," he said dumbly. Ino Yamanaka, actually volunteering to not shop… "Are you, uh, are you okay?"

She just shrugged. "Yeah." When he kept staring, she sighed. "Don't worry about it, Chouji. Just get the food." With that, she was off, leaving tiny bare footprints in the dust. When he met her back on the main road twenty minutes later, she was wearing sturdy gray leather boots, slouchy canvas shorts, and a red tank top that was baggier than the skin beneath the Hokage's eyes after a night of carousing. She'd tied it up somehow around her stomach in an obvious attempt to give it some shape, but it was still huge.

When he opened his mouth to say something, she held up a single finger and gritted out, "Don't. I'm aware I look like shit, okay? But this stuff was cheapest, we've got a little extra cash now and we've got food and I only had to knock out one of those idiots from the bar out on the way here to meet you, so things went well and now we should get back on track, okay?"

Chouji stared at this strange person and wondered where his Ino had disappeared to. Shikamaru had said something to him just the other day, not long after they'd helped Ino move into her new place- Shika had said, "Cho, listen, Ino's got less self-discipline than Jiraiya in a whorehouse and she's never had to manage her own money before, and this apartment is too nice for a chuunin's salary, so we need to help her smooth things out with her father before she ends up homeless and hating herself, got it?"

At the time Chouji had been a bit preoccupied with the tingly notion of possibly asking the intimidatingly cute Airi, who always remembered to bring him extra soy sauce, out for a date, and he'd thought Shikamaru was being a bit overdramatic and possibly overprotective, like he usually was with Ino. He hadn't quite understood the whole business with her clan, other than that she'd been in one hell of a fight with her old man over something to do with her old hospital job, the one she'd quit after the big blowout, and he'd noticed she wasn't working the flower shop anymore either. But now it was obvious that she was short on money. Nothing in the world but dire necessity could have forced Ino to wear clothing like that, all plain and boring and oversized. So obviously Chouji should have actually listened to his genius friend.

"Ino," he started cautiously. "If you need a loan, I mean, I can help you out-" Airi could wait. His friend and his teammate needed help.

She fixed him with a look that probably could have started a forest fire. "No." He could practically see her spine turning to iron, and with every passing moment her stubborn chin lifted higher into the air.

Crap. Shikamaru was going to kill him. "Okay. Uh, let's go, I guess," he said uncertainly, wanting to press the issue, but knowing from her tone that it wouldn't end well.

She gave him a crooked smile, put her right shoulder to the setting sun, and started to run.

* * *

Author says: Okay SO uh... this is my first foray into the Naruto fandom and Ino is difficult to write, as much as I love her, so I WELCOME constructive criticism but please realize that I haven't read every single manga chapter/watched the entire anime. So you can consider this canon compliant up to about Shippuden 125 or so, and from then on it's an AU. I really really like Ino, I want a story where she gets the kind of character development Sakura so often gets (I love Sakura too) so this is my attempt at giving her some maturation. Opinions are DEEPLY AWESOME and if you like this at all, please let me know beacuse I'm super nervous about it!

(Dire Circus fans: I swear to god I have not abandoned that story!)


	2. Chapter 2

For a long, very un-ninjalike moment, Shikamaru was stuck in the blurry place between waking and dreaming, trying to crawl to full awareness through a head full of sleep while being unsure what exactly had managed to wake him. If there was anything the Nara clan did well besides quietly topple dynasties, it was sleep the night through, and yet a squint at his alarm clock told him it was barely midnight.

"Hello? Hello? Hello there? Hello?"

"Oh god." There was no way Shikamaru could mistake that squeaky voice, as much as he might like to. "Hey, Kuma."

"Hello! Hi there! Hi!"

"What do you want?" Shikamaru rolled over in bed and regarded Chouji's summons with as much false friendliness as he could muster this time of night. The fluffy little sun bear cub just cocked its head, let its long tongue loll out happily, and looked generally cheerful in the moonlight.

"Chouji's got a message for you!" Kuma shuffled closer to the edge of the bed and let Shikamaru untie the scroll from his back.

"Okay," Shikamaru grunted. "Ugh. Give me a few minutes, I'll give you a reply. Nothing urgent, is it?"

"No, no, him and the starving lady are fine-" The damn bear insisted on referring to Ino as 'the starving lady' and no amount of her threatening could make him stop. It was a side effect of being around the well-padded Akimichi clan, probably. "-But he says no answer needed."

"Oh?" Shikamaru murmured. "I'll read it tomorrow morning, then." Not bothering to wait for the bear cub to leave, he was back under the covers and comatose in a heartbeat.

He read it first thing the next morning, between yawns, sitting in his window seat and blowing the smoke from his cigarette out through the panes. Chouji didn't waste any time getting to the good parts.

'Hey Shika,' the scroll read, in Chouji's firm, tilted script. There was a barbecue sauce stain on a corner of the parchment. 'You were right, Ino's broke. She lost her clothes in a river and Kiba took her extras-'

Here Shikamaru's brows rose about as far as they could go. Ino's feud with her ex had gotten extreme, it seemed.

'-vAnd I forgot rations, so she conned some guys into playing darts to get us money and now she's wearing big ugly clothes because she wouldn't spend. Help. You were right. Work your magic, talk to her dad, I'll help when I get back, and do something painful to Kiba. Later. Cho.'

"Will do, brother," Shikamaru said to the scroll, laughing in spite of himself. He'd seen a mysteriously pink Akamaru roaming around the village, of course, and the week before that he'd most definitely noticed a raging, hungover Ino stalking through the village with a faceful of indelible ink scribbles. No one with half a brain could miss the prank war his teammate had somehow started with Kiba, but it seemed the dog boy had inadvertently put her in quite the pickle with his latest retaliation.

Hmm. Had she lost_ all_ her clothes?

Shikamaru shook his head bemusedly and got ready for the day. To his surprise, the Hokage's tower was so empty it echoed when he clocked in. Usually the large, circular common room at the base of the tower was bustling in the morning, full of bright-eyed genin looking for cats that needed saving and old women who needed their fences painted, and older ninja jostling for the best mission assignments. Once he'd even seen Kurenai put a mist genjutsu to use to snatch a primo mission out from under Gai's overeager nose.

But today there wasn't a soul there except for him. He took a peek at the missions board and was so surprised he actually stopped to stare. There were only four lonely unclaimed missions tacked up, two of which were mere D-ranks. What the hell was going on and who'd stolen all the ninja from his village?

He passed Shizune in one of the hallways and snagged her sleeve. "Where is everyone?"

She raised a brow, looking harried. "We received an unexpected number of urgent missions yesterday."

Shikamaru paused, blinking. The word set off a tiny alarm in the back of his mind. "Urgent? How urgent?"

Shizune shrugged. "Urgent enough. A few escort jobs, uh, one assassination, a few trade missions. Well-paying, too, so Tsunade took them all. It was a good day, we needed the money after the slow month we just had."

"Do you happen to have the current missions list, by any chance?" Shikamaru said casually. Something in the air was making him edgy; he had a bad feeling crawling like spiders over his skin. There wasn't any point in making Shizune paranoid without concrete proof, though. The poor woman had enough to do, judging by the size of the stack of paperwork she was hauling around.

"Tsunade's got it. She's still passed out, don't worry, she won't move until I bring her coffee," Shizune said, lips pursing in disgust.

"Oh, damn, a hungover Hokage. All right, thanks." He gave a her a desolate wave and headed up the steps to Tsunade's office, rubbing his hands over his arms and trying to get rid of his sudden goosebumps.

He never felt like this without a reason, though. The first time he'd gotten this feeling had been before the chuunin exams and Suna's invasion, and each and every time after, something equally troublesome had happened. People called him a genius, but much of it was just keeping his eyes open and listening to his instincts. He'd better think this out and discover what it was his subconscious was so nervous about, puzzle out what his lizard brain had piece together. First, Ino and Cho, called away with only a day's notice on a mission all the way to the Land of Waves. Now that he thought about it, he'd seen Sakura, Kakashi, and Naruto in the distance headed out to the gates this very morning, and they'd only just gotten back from a mission. And hadn't Team Gai been gone for a month or so? Something to do with a caravan and bandits? He'd written up that assignment himself. There was no reason it should have taken a month, and since Tsunade hadn't set up a rescue mission, Team Gai must have run into difficulties and sent her an update at some point.

Frowning, he suppressed his chakra and slunk into Tsunade's office, nose wrinkling at the sour smell of the sake spilled across the carpet.

"Whazza?" Entirely unfooled by his chakra suppression, even in her current misery, she lifted her head an inch off her desk and cracked a reddened eye at him. "Oh. Nara. Leave me to die."

"Yes ma'am." He snagged the missions roster off the shelf with a tendril of shadow and escaped, sighing in relief. He'd rather face a herd of enraged Kyuubi than his hungover boss. Last week she'd literally tossed him out the window when he'd told her she had a council meeting in an hour and couldn't show up sloshed.

The missions roster was inconclusive, though. Forty-seven percent of Konoha's jounins were currently dispatched on jobs outside the village, sixty-eight percent of the chuunin were gone as well, and most surprisingly, over half the ANBU teams were out too.

All in all, that was well over half Konoha's forces gone- and it was well over the percentages normally sent out. The numbers made him clench his jaw, but when he risked life and limb again to creep into Tsunade's office and lift the individual missions folders from her desk, every single mission appeared entirely legitimate. Many of the employers had a good record of previous transactions with Konoha, nothing appeared forged or suspicious, and just as Shizune had said, the payments were all perfectly adequate.

Irritated, he went over everything one more time, slowly, mapping the location of each mission in his head to try and see if perhaps Konoha's forces were being lured into a trap of some kind, but they were widely spread out, just as they usually were, with no clear pattern. He ended up just glowering at the folders, sipping his steaming coffee and thinking hard.

The caffeine was useless, though. Eventually he gave up and returned the paperwork to Tsunade, who, now conscious, lifted a suspicious brow at him, but thankfully she didn't ask.

After work, though, he went to the mews, hired a messenger bird, and send Cho and Ino a short note. 'Keep an eye out,' was all he wrote, but they'd understand. It didn't keep the chill out of his bones, but it was all he could do.

At least, it was all he could do until another hawk, incoming, crashed into his back as he turned to leave. It was a distinctive bird, pale tan and speckled with black, with fearsome orange eyes, and he recognized it immediately, despite all the blood and mussed feathers- the thing had obviously come from a fight.

He practically kicked down the door to Tsunade's office, and he actually did fling the bird at her, ignoring their twin startled squawks as they collided.

"What the hell is this, Nara?" She snapped out of her hangover like magic and soothed the bird absently, wrangling the battered scroll from its back.

"That's a Suna bird, ma'am, and it's the one Neji always uses. He says it's the only bird he can trust from 'that damn sandpit'." His mouth was dry. All signs pointed to trouble ahead, and work, and- he sighed heavily.

"Hmph." She took another look at the swaying bird.

The warning prickle on Shikamaru's skin heightened to an anxious burn. If he'd been anyone else, he would have fidgeted. "Ma'am?" he prompted, eyeing the scroll.

"Oh. Right." She popped it open with one scarlet nail, stroking the hawk's head gently with her other hand. "Oh, dammit. Dammit!"

"What?"

"Neji's team's been led into an ambush that's just about as neat as anything I could put together on my best day," she snarled, slamming a fist down on her desk; Shikamaru rescued the hapless hawk absently. "Not only that, but Suna's reporting a mysterious loss of some of their best jounin- and those jounin were hired for some of the exact same missions I just assigned. They were fake. We've been had."

Shikamaru thought about Temari and experienced a bout of terror so profound that he had to lean with both his hands onto the back of a chair. "I knew it," he muttered sickly. The Suna hawk shifted uneasily on his shoulder, trying to preen its feathers back into order.

Tsunade eyed him. "What? You knew what?"

Shikamaru shook his head. "The high volume of our ninja, out on missions all at once, all of a sudden." She winced and cursed under her breath; he pressed on. "It was suspicious. I checked the locations of the assignments, the customers, but there wasn't anything concrete, so I didn't say anything." He regarded the scroll grimly. "Appears I should've."

Tsunade clicked her tongue before beginning to pace, heels tapping in a way that set his teeth on edge. "Makes sense, shit, I should've seen it a mile away. Well, your woman's fine." He chose not to answer to dispute that title, but he was relieved. If there was trouble anywhere on Suna soil, Temari would find a way to be right in the middle of it, every single time. She had a knack for sniffing out violence like nobody he'd ever seen, except maybe Sakura. "Neji and his team are on their way back, we'll know more about who's behind this once they return. They're two days out, though. Send out hawks or summons to each team in the field- recall them right now."

That jolted Shikamaru out of his dark, convoluted thoughts. "Some of the missions our nin are out on may be legitimate," he pointed out. "If we recall them all indiscriminately, we risk angering clients. We risk the entire reputation of Konoha on something we're not sure of-"

"I know that, brat," Tsunade burst out, glaring magnificently. "But it's just as foolish to risk half our ninja, leaving them to walk into unexpected enemy fire without warning!" He eyed her, confused. One single case of an ambush, however well it might align with his sourceless anxieties, was proof of nothing, so why had she leapt upon the danger so fast? Under his inquiring gaze, she frowned. "Genma's team, out by Mist, was ambushed today, at dawn," she admitted. "It seemed like nothing when I got the initial report, a usual field danger, you know? But when all the pieces fit together-"

Shikamaru grunted. She was right, really. But there were too many unknowns. Were all the teams out on assignments truly in danger? If the faceless enemy had truly orchestrated this exodus of Konoha nin onto foreign soil in order to ambush them, then recalling all teams would be the best course.

"I would very much like to know who's behind all this," the Hokage muttered venomously, one hand lifting to press absently against the seal on her forehead as she re-read the scroll from Neji.

"Mm," was all Shikamaru said. He agreed heartily, though.

Their shared moment of gloomy thought was broken when Shizune burst through the door, waving a scroll.

"Milady- there's been an-"

"Ambush," Tsunade supplied softly, dangerously, rising to her feet in rather the same ominous way a thunderstorm storm rolled up the horizon.

Shizune blinked. "I- yes- how did you know?"

"Who was it?" Shikamaru said sharply.

"Shino's team," she breathed.

Tsunade snarled wordlessly and stomped one foot so hard that the whole tower shook. "Damn! You two, get out, get warnings to every single ninja still out there! Now!"

Shikamaru and Shizune exchanged a single, burning glance before spinning to run, chakra hot in the soles of their feet.

* * *

It took three hard day's travel to reach the Land of Waves, and by the time they got there, Ino was tired and dirty. The only thing on her brain was a bath and sleep.

Unfortunately, they had to report in to their client. Normally Ino wouldn't have cared that she currently looked like a rather unsuccessful, possibly homeless potato farmer- well, she wouldn't have cared _much_, anyway. There was only so much magic she could work on herself when she was roughing it on a mission, and it had only taken her a single stab wound- two years ago and courtesy of being blinded by her melting makeup- for her to be able to, if not quite achieve true indifference, at least fake comfort with her mandatorily ragged field appearance.

Normally. But their client, the son of a reasonably wealthy silk trader, was young, and he was so attractive that she felt like she might possibly combust just staring at him, and she was filthy in hideous clothes.

Sometimes life just wasn't fair.

"Hello there," he said, smiling, dark eyes crinkling. She went weak at the knees. Dark eyes were catnip to her, always had been, and _ooh_, but the man had nice broad shoulders, unusually nice for a merchant's son, probably he got all sweaty and flushed throwing cargo around shirtless- "What was that?" he asked.

She cleared her throat, reminded herself that she was _Ino Yamanaka_, dammit, the most feared man-eater under the age of twenty-one in the entirety of Konoha, and she would _not_ be cowed by some stupid edible-looking chunk of delectable man- and repeated herself, this time without stuttering, "We'd like to survey the wagons we'll be guarding for you before the caravan leaves this evening, Mr. Himura."

"For security purposes," Chouji added placidly. Out of view of their client, he kicked her foot. She made a mental note to take revenge later.

"Ah," said the illegally adorable Mr. Himura, practically glowing with that delightful golden shine of wealth and good breeding. Ino took a moment to appreciate his nicely pouty lower lip. Maybe this mission wouldn't be a bust after all. "I'm glad you asked. It's right through that door and out the hall, in the central courtyard."

They bowed and went in the direction he'd pointed; just as Chouji was halfway out the door, Mr. Himura called after them. "Kunoichi, could you stay a moment, please? I've a favor to ask you. My younger sister's going to be traveling with the caravan and she'll need individual escorting."

Ino gritted her teeth. "Ah, special services that weren't paid for at the last minute," she hissed to Chouji, who looked sympathetic. Clients who tried to pull shit like this were the worst. It was annoying, and also it was stealing, stealing a ninja's services; it was the slightly less evil version of calling an S-rank mission a C-rank to save money. She rolled her eyes, shoved her teammate out the elaborately carved mahogany door, and turned to Mr. Himura with a wide smile faker than Tsunade's wrinkle-free skin. "So? I'm guessing you want me to watch out for your sister while the caravan's on the move, then?"

He leaned back in his chair, and suddenly the air felt thick and his dark eyes weren't so sweet. Her stomach did a backflip and the smile slid sickly off her face as all her instincts started to scream warning. She caught the flare of his nostrils and the subtle tension around his eyes and stiffened, fingers trembling against her kunai holster. "Actually," he drawled, "No."

When the dark flare of the chakra he'd been suppressing hit her, she bolted for the door and Chouji, flinging two senbon in Himura's direction in an attempt to distract him for the half-second she'd need to escape. Chakra like his, heavy and massive, and so much of it- she'd known she was outmatched the second she felt it, and when he materialized in front of the door before she could even touch it, with stunning speed, she knew it for sure.

She darted back and stared at him grimly, pissed at everyone and everything. She hadn't been caught in a stupid ambush for a very long time, and she hadn't missed a shinobi's chakra signature in years. Sakura was going to laugh until she cracked a rib when she heard about this. He stared back, one eyebrow lifting. "You are so _not_ hot," she proclaimed finally. "But I'm going to scar up your stupid not-hot face anyway, just for fun." The kunai in her hand was cold and comforting, the same as her silly boasting, and her ugly boots were firm and steady on the expensive carpeting.

"Big talk, little leaf nin," Himura said with a devious grin.

She shifted her weight to her left foot, heart loud and crazed in her ears; he shifted his just to the right, ready to counter any move she made. They stood, five feet apart, and waited.

In books, fights were always very dramatic and loud, full of shouting and impulsive, valiant frontal charges. But there was a reason that the number one rule of being a ninja was stealth; a nice, quiet assassination was much easier and less deadly than going toe to toe with someone. Flashy moves were useless if carelessness got you killed. So, as Asuma had taught her, she watched Himura, her breathing shallow and fast, and hoped he would be impatient enough, or would underestimate her enough, to make the first move. Obviously he was skilled and experienced enough to know to do the same, judging by the almost lazy way he was standing, just as still as she.

That, or he was playing with her. She bit the inside of her lip.

"People think making the first move is advantageous, you know?" Shikamaru had once told her, while trying vainly to get her interested in a game of shogi with him during a particularly boring diplomatic mission. "But if you let your opponent make the first move, and you watch them closely enough, they always give something away, something you can use."

"Do you play shogi, by chance?" she asked Himura, around the tightness in her throat. Waiting and waiting, chakra humming nervously under her skin, her palm sweaty around the hilt of her kunai, and her ears full of her racing heart and the rush of hot winds outside- it was nearly unbearable. She felt like razor wire pulled tight, right on the point of snapping.

He blinked at her, nonplussed. At some point, with speed she hadn't even seen, he'd drawn a katana, and the slick gleam of it chilled her. The atmosphere thickened until it crackled. "No?"

"Ah, too bad. It's a fun game." She was stalling now, scanning him for any possible weak point, flaring her chakra up and down in a very clear ninja SOS, hoping for Chouji to come bursting through the door at any moment.

"So I hear," Himura muttered, lifting a brow. "I'm getting bored."

He went through his seals with blinding speed and spat fire at her with a great rushing roar. She only just evaded with a backbend that practically snapped her spine and lunged at him. Metal clashed; she drove her knee into his thigh, took an unavoidable fist to the ribs as she skittered away, recalibrating her odds and wincing as she did so. He was indeed very fast, and he knew how to use his sword.

"Carve up my_ face_," he mumbled sourly, sighing ash. "This whole thing is so much trouble."

"You sound just like a guy I know, except way more annoying," she spat, flicking a senbon towards him, aiming for his right arm; she'd caught the slight clumsiness in his blow to her ribs, which had been left handed. He wasn't ambidextrous, and if she could take out his right arm he'd be unable to wield his katana-

"Really?" he said reprovingly, batting it out of the way with his blade. Fire bloomed in her direction again; she snapped out a clone and tried to work her way around behind him, but he cottoned on instantly and dispatched her clone with what looked like some sort of lava jutsu, and then she was flipping off the walls, sweating, skin singeing as he breathed flames at her like some sort of deranged dragon.

She was panting, now, evading for her life, gaining a new burn with every fireball he shot at her, and she couldn't fucking get inside his defenses no matter how she tried. Taijutsu had never been her strong point, not at all. She tossed a few water jutsu his way, more out of desperation than anything else; they sizzled away pitifully and she cursed.

"Who are you and why are you doing this?" she yelped, only just avoiding a shuriken aimed at her throat. Himura only shrugged. This guy was jounin level at least, way better than she was and with three times as much chakra, and no matter how she fought it, she was starting to feel the cold, familiar tightness that came with true animal fear.

She'd felt that fear many times, had imagined the faces of her parents and friends when her body was brought home, in more fights than she could count. It was part and unpleasant parcel of being shinobi, and the thought of her own death caught at her straining lungs and lay heavy on her shoulders, but she could bear it, at least mostly.

When she heard Chouji's dull screams in the distance, though, and felt the rumble of smashing earth, the cold became unbearable ice.

"Fuck you," she screamed frantically, and she whipped through her seals and wrapped her body in swirling water that was as chilly as her frightened soul. She dived straight through Himura's next fireball, pushing through even as her protective water evaporated into stinging steam, and she got a moment of satisfaction from the startled look on his face as she punched him square in the throat. That water-wrapping jutsu was weak as hell, only learned on a whim back as a bored genin, but it had been useful today.

He blocked the kunai she was aiming for his chest, unfortunately, but she managed to slide around to his side and elbow him good and hard in the temple before she had to retreat again, though it cost her an eye-crossingly painful fist to the cheekbone. He stumbled and choked, clutching his partially collapsed windpipe; she smirked, a little taken aback by the success of her gambit, then slipped nimbly around him and dived towards the door.

"Not so fast," he barked, and the pain of his katana stabbing through her shoulder made everything stop. She sagged numbly forward against the door, a sort of high-pitched whine rising in her throat, boots slipping in the scorched, soaked carpet that she'd been admiring only minutes ago. Speed had never been her forte either.

She only had one breathless moment to stare down in shock at the bloody sword protruding through her shoulder, foreign and so very nauseatingly _wrong_, before he used the thing to pull her back to him like a sausage on a toothpick.

The pain was literally blinding, and all she could see through the white-hot sparks swimming across her teary vision was his face, dead serious now, as he wheezed angrily and wrapped a hand around her throat. She'd never been good at close-quarters combat, not at all, and he swatted away her weak punches with his free hand easily, not even trying as he lifted her into the air and slammed her back against the wall.

Chouji screamed again as something large smashed outside, the sounds muffled through the walls, and her eyes slid closed as she clawed vainly at Himura's wrist. Everything went sort of numb when he yanked his sword out of her, and when he pressed harder on her throat, she almost felt _good_, kind of peaceful and floaty, like she was in a really nice hot springs or something.

Himura dug his fingers cruelly into the wound on her shoulder and all the airless peace was gone as she shrieked.

As her eyes bulged, as she struggled to suck in a breath or poke his eyes out with hands that wouldn't obey her, she could practically hear Sakura telling her to look underneath the underneath, to fight smart, not hard.

But Chouji was still shouting, still fighting, the sounds of battle clear to her even through the walls of this asshole's fancy house-

The _walls_. She couldn't fight close quarters, couldn't fight this guy the way she needed in this cramped space, and he'd never in a million years let her out either of the doors, so she'd just have to open things up a bit and rely on luck.

She used her working arm and stabbed one of her shaky chakra scalpels into a sensitive point on his wrist. It was dull and flickering, nothing like Sakura's razor-sharp ones, and all he did was grunt and drip a bit of blood onto her, but she managed to hiss in a single, wonderful breath when his grip loosened. "Gonna redecorate," she squeaked rebelliously.

Himura snorted and opened his mouth to say something, distracted, eyes focused on hers as he reveled in his incomplete victory. She slid four exploding tags from the waistband of her shorts and flicked them out.

Himura caught the motion, of course, not soon enough to stop her, but he only chuckled. "You missed me, you stupid girl, and I'm a foot away from you," he said almost delightedly.

"Not _you_," she managed to rasp out irritably.

The tags- armed with some of Tenten's extra special superpowered seals- went off with a wonderful bang that she felt down to her toes. Himura was blown sideways into the wall beside her by the blast, though he didn't fully release her throat, but she managed to reach up and painfully overextend his elbow joint, gaining just enough leverage to pull away and shoot towards the smoking hole the tags had made in the wall of his stupid office. Just as she'd hoped, it led straight outside. Apparently her luck hadn't entirely deserted her. She blurred through the hole and out into the amazing, beautiful, fresh open air, nearly delirious with the sudden return of oxygen to her lungs.

There was chaos all around her. There wasn't even a _fake_ caravan, she noted bitterly, just the massive craters and destruction caused by Cho's expansion jutsu antics, and Chouji himself, currently swinging his oversized arms around at three ninjas.

"Come to join the party?" he shouted, noticing her immediately, even as he smooshed one of the enemy ninja permanently into the ground with a nasty squelch.

She was about to shout back, "Fashionably late!" when Himura materialized in front of her with speed that made her snarl.

"You stupid leaf ninja," he bellowed, slashing at her stomach. She dodged, just barely, wincing as her ugly tank top got slashed open by his blade, and then she sprang onto the roof, sending the very last of her exploding tags at Himura and zooming through the seals of a replacement jutsu under cover of the smoke, ignoring how the forced movements agonized her shoulder. Her replacement stayed on the roof for the few seconds she needed to run, taunting Himura quite skillfully and using some very inventive profanities, while the real Ino let loose a smoke bomb for more cover- that was another one of Tenten's signature tricks- and shot forward towards Chouji, ready to defend his back. She couldn't exactly use her mind control jutsu now, not with so many enemies about and no one to defend her body-

Oh. Actually, maybe she could. "Cho," she hissed, fending off an enemy nin's kunai with her own and only just missing their throat. "That tree, two o'clock."

That was all she had to say. She didn't have to tell him to watch her body, or that she'd be carefully henged and hidden, or that she'd be aiming to control the strongest of the enemy and make his life easier while he fought hand to hand. He knew all that from long experience, and he gave her a single terse nod before casually smacking the enemy she was fighting out of the way and into one of the walls of the compound with a nasty crunch. She leapt into the tree, a massive spreading oak overlooking the courtyard, and watched in dismay as Himura stabbed her short-lived replacement-jutsu self right through the heart. Her fake self popped into the bit of exploded wall that it actually was and Himura stomped like a little kid having a tantrum. She watched from behind the cover of the oak leaves, grimacing as the pain from her impaled shoulder set in fully and passionately.

She suppressed her chakra carefully, henged herself into a simple branch full of oak leaves, and formed the seals for her possession jutsu, keeping Himura in her sights and trying to ignore the pained grunt of Chouji as he took a blade to the shin. His blood was terribly bright and wet in the hot sunlight.

She bit down her cry, sliced her teammate's name off half-formed between her teeth, and finished her seals. A brief moment of swooping delirious vertigo, half a heartbeat of nauseating flight, and she was Himura.

In his body, she punched herself in the face, just on principle and because she'd told him she'd ruin his stupid handsome features, and she relished his confused fear as he thrashed in a confined corner of his own head. He'd been toying with her, really, and she'd gotten lucky, because as she glanced through his memories, it was obvious he had quite a bit more battle experience than she did. If he'd been serious in killing her, she'd be dead now.

But his body's highly developed muscle memory was now a tool for her to use, and she leapt off the roof with a glad cry, taking advantage of one of the enemy's lack of suspicion to push Himura's blade between the hapless ninja's ribs.

"You keep your sword sharp, good," she told Himura silently, inside the shadows of his skull. He screamed soundlessly, and she smiled.

Pulling his sword out of the ninja she'd just impaled was hideously unpleasant, despite Himura's awesome upper body strength. She planted her foot on the dead man's ribs and yanked, grunting. Chouji snickered breathlessly and she fixed him with a glare.

"Three left, you better get moving," he shouted, promptly leaving another of the enemy spasming weakly on the ground; just two left then, actually, counting Himura, who was a dead man walking.

She grinned, opened her mouth to reply- and then the shadows beneath the tree her body was perched in blurred like stirred liquid, warped, and all Himura's speed wasn't enough to take her there in time. A female ninja, who'd apparently been lurking unseen for this whole battle, hidden under a stunning henge, reared back and aimed her kunai at Ino's defenseless body.

Ino lifted her hands to break out of Himura's body, but she already knew it wouldn't be fast enough-

Everything slowed, even as it went far too fast. Chouji was far closer than her to her body, and he'd been working so hard on his speed lately, even to the point of suffering through training with Gai, and he got to the tree before she could complete her seals. He took the blow meant for her body as she stared in delirious panic, he bellowed like an elephant as he slapped the hidden kunoichi clear across the courtyard to a messy ending, but then there was so much of his bright, bright blood, and she couldn't breathe.

It was Himura's voiceless, mocking laughter that brought her back to life, that pulled her back from the sight of the kunai hilt-deep in Chouji's guts.

She fell on Himura's sword, finishing her seals as she did so, and she only had to bear six seconds of Himura's drowning, dying agony before returning to her body.

She turned to Chouji immediately, snapping out a clone to distract the single enemy ninja left. "Cho! Cho, oh, god, hold still, hold still, I'll take care of you, you're going to be okay-" She was babbling and lying all at the same time, because he'd already passed out, and there was so much _blood_ and she had so little chakra left, hardly any really after all the techniques she'd had to pull. She ripped his shirt open and put her hands over the kunai, clenching her teeth so hard it hurt, and brought up all the training Tsunade and Sakura had put her through.

She'd made a little progress stopping the bleeding, was about to try and do the really delicate part, pulling the kunai out and healing around it as she went to stop him from bleeding out, when her clone dissipated with a pop.

The only foe left alive stood in the dry dust of the courtyard, nudged Himura's body with one toe, then looked squarely up at her. He was an older man, greying and wiry, with a face made leather by the sun, and when she probed for his chakra, he had so much left that she quailed inside.

"Well," he said at last, shouldering his axe and regarding her steadily. "This didn't quite go as expected for either of us."

She kept her green-glowing hands on Chouji's stomach and watched the enemy carefully, squinting in the burning sunlight. It was so very quiet all of a sudden, the absence of screams and clashing metal ringing in her ears. "I suppose it didn't," she said at length. "Care to tell me why you ambushed us?"

He regarded her calmly, reaching up to scratch under the tattered scarf tied around his head. No hitai-ate, she noticed distantly, but he had shinobi written all over him. "Not so much," he answered.

She should press him for answers. It was standard procedure, and now that Chouji was at least partially less likely to die, she should be back on the battlefield. She couldn't kill the already-dead kunoichi who'd done this awful thing to her boy, but she could kill someone, and the desire was delectable. Hadn't standing over the grave of Hidan, deep in the Nara woods, been so heartbreakingly delicious she'd practically cried? Hadn't she gone there every month after Asuma's death to pound the dirt and laugh at the buried pieces of his killer, far below her, hoping Hidan could hear her taunting so much that it made her sick? Revenge had a taste she'd loved instantly.

The enemy below was watching her keenly, and it seemed he felt her sudden shift to bloodlust, because he chuckled a little, scrubbing at his greyish beard as if hiding a smile. She burned. "Look. You're low on chakra, girl, and your teammate's not going to be any help. You're practically bled out yourself, anyway." Her impaled shoulder, forgotten in the face of Chouji's danger, throbbed at the man's words, and she felt sticky dampness all down her side when she shifted. "If you surrender I'll make it an easy death for you both. That's the best you'll get out of this. No dishonor in it, we're all afraid of the end."

She only stared at him, quivering. Even if she'd wanted to move she didn't think she was able.

He sighed a little and looked old and sad. "I really don't want to kill you two kids at all, but I've got mouths to feed, all right? So come on down here and I promise it won't hurt. You won't know a thing. I swear it. I'll give you a gentle death and I'll leave your bodies for your people to find."

"No!" she spat, instantly incensed, and she lifted hands coated to the wrist in Chouji's slippery blood. The tang of rage was sour and strong on her tongue as she said, "I've got enough chakra to do what I need to do." She hadn't felt fear like this since Asuma had died, nor so much anger. It fueled her, lit her up from the inside and fanned her will of fire. She embraced it and her smile widened even as her whole body shook. Chouji would live, and they would make it home, and there were _no other_ possibilities.

She'd completed half the seals for her possession jutsu a moment ago, while her hands were indistinct beneath the green glow of her healing chakra and half-hidden from the enemy behind leaves, and now she finished the final seal and dove with shrieking glee into the man's body.

He hadn't seen such an attack coming at all, but he twisted, squirmed, and fought her off in a powerful way she hadn't encountered since Sakura and their first chuunin exams, but she was stronger now. She clung and clawed and used the very last drop of her energy in a technique she'd found in her clan's most hidden scrolls- if the clan thought they could kick her out and not pay a price for it, they were _wrong_. It felt so good to feel her chakra dicing like a careless scalpel through his brain that her nausea tripled.

She pulled out of what was left of his mind and promptly collapsed, forehead resting against Chouji's hot, firm shoulder.

The enemy ninja blinked and stared at the dusty corpse of Himura. The look that stole over his face was so familiar, so painfully close to Ino's own heart, that she began to cry softly, stress and the aftermath of adrenaline and blood loss all snowballing together into something very close to shock.

Her enemy dropped to his knees and cradled Himura. "Umeko?" he slurred. Tears cut tracks through the dirt on his weathered cheeks. "Baby, no, wake up. Umeko! Please! Please! Oh, no, no!"

Umeko was his daughter. Ino had seen her face when she'd shredded through his memories. Umeko was a pretty brunette, smiling, thirty-two years old with two toddlers and another baby on the way, living peacefully in a village far to the north. Umeko's father, who had taken her fishing and named her first son and given her away at her wedding, was going to slowly starve to death, convinced, in his scorched brain, that his only child was dead in his arms. He would spend the last days of his life trapped in the fresh pain of loss, no matter if anyone came to his rescue or not, and Umeko would never see her father again. It wasn't a genjutsu that could be broken; it was real, irreversible damage, just the same as if she'd lobotomized him.

Ino sobbed hoarsely and pressed weak hands against Chouji's wound, managing to put a few kunai through her shirt and his to keep them up in the tree before she fainted.

* * *

**Author says: **Chapter twoooo! First of all, I'd like to thank the wonderful Professor Maka for beta'ing for me. :) Thanks Proma! Secondly, again, because I'm worried about it- I'm definitely aware that some things in this are not strictly canon compliant, jutsu-wise or whatever. So if you see a 'Naruto mistake' then it's probably just me mutilating canon under the pretense of 'creativity' or something. You know, character ages, the fine details of how a technique works, someone's chakra type, that sort of thing. But concrit is VERY VERY WELCOME! Let me know how you liked it and thanks for reading ;)


	3. Chapter 3

"Yamanaka. Wake up. Yamanaka! Come on!"

She kept her eyes firmly shut and waved a hand. "No. I need my beauty sleep." More murmuring, more shrieking pain from somewhere around her shoulder, and then vertigo. Was she moving? Maybe. Everything was so dark. "All my chakra…" she mumbled, swirling, marveling at the loss of it where it normally dwelled bright and ready in her chest. She was emptied out, reversed and upside down. Her veins felt scoured clean and smooth and her eyes were scratchy and tired.

"It'll come back," someone assured her.

She categorized the voice automatically while trying very hard to remember how her eyelids worked. Male, vaguely distorted though coming from very close to her, amused and deep. Through a mask, then, and it wasn't Kakashi's voice. "Hey, Anbu," she sighed, feeling very fuzzy and limp, like a wrung-out dishrag. "Thank you for carrying me to wherever we're going but your hand is awful close to my ass."

The hand retreated hastily up her back, to the sound of distant laughter. She concentrated very hard on her irregular breathing and after a long, long time, cracked one eye. Sure enough, a smooth white mask swam into view in front of her face. She stared for a while at the plum slashes on its cheeks, feeling warm and content, if not a little numb, then closed her eyes again.

After a bit, she heard grinding teeth, and she opened her eye again, just a little. The bright sunlight hurt and the movement of the trees all around her as they moved was disorienting. Now who exactly would be so anxious without something between their teeth? "Genma?" she hazarded.

More laughter from the shadowy figures leaping beside them. Genma groaned, sounding weirdly hollow under the mask. "Yeah, it's me. How the hell'd you know? Some kind of fucking black ops ninja I am."

"Yamanaka secret," she confided loftily, feeling victorious. "I feel _very_ strange."

"Fun," Genma said irreverently. "Well. You've got a syringe full of the Hokage's best pain meds in you right now, kid, courtesy of Pink. I bet you feel strange, all right, strangely awesome."

She hummed and delighted in how liquid the clear sunshine was through the branches speeding by. The air smelled good, hot and wet, like a greenhouse. They must be in the forests south of Konoha, the hot ones with the strange flowers larger than she was and the buzzing humid winds that never made it down to the ground. "Pain meds and Sakura, huh. Did a bit of me get chopped off? Was I fighting?"

"Nah. Well, you'll have a pretty impressive scar, but no missing limbs. And scars are hot as hell on kunoichi, so don't worry."

His voice was very casual, perfectly mirthful, but even in her fog she caught the flicker of his hand tensing on her back. "What's wrong? What aren't you telling me?" she said, and when he didn't answer, she started to struggle, weakly, but enough that he had to skid to a stop on a big branch and loop his other arm around her knees to keep her from falling. "Something- there was something- why can't I remember? It was a mission, wasn't it, and I didn't pay my electricity, and-"

"Give us a minute," Genma sighed to his companion, the one she couldn't quite focus on yet, and he set her on her feet. She wobbled and clung to him; he let her, kept a hand on her elbow and an arm around her waist.

"We don't have time for this," someone else said, impatient and brusque. "We've got to get moving. The Hokage told us to hurry back."

Ino rubbed her eyes furiously into one of Genma's scratchy sleeves and then turned to glower at the blurry asshole who'd spoken, swaying on her feet. "Jerk! If you shut the hell up and give me like _two _minutes I'll be fine, okay?" She very much wanted to stomp her feet but was afraid she'd fall.

The asshole sniffed and crossed their arms. She squinted harder and tried to sort of flail her way past the drugs numbing her, but it was useless. Everything stayed strange and she still couldn't figure out why she was chakraless in the middle of the woods with Genma, of all people, and some random impatient jounin.

Genma was grinding his teeth again. "Last time I ran into you, you tried to pinch my butt," she accused plaintively. Blurry Asshole started to positively cackle.

Genma just shrugged. She growled, lifted a hand to punch him, and then cried out as her half-healed shoulder protested ferociously, drugs or not.

The pain thinned the fog, and when she smacked a fist into her wound, it was enough to bring her entirely back to herself, just like a kunai to the leg to dispell a genjutsu. Himura, the ambush, the _blood- _ "Oh my god," she shrieked, stumbling backwards and nearly falling out of the tree. "Cho! Where the fuck is Chouji? Where is he?"

Blurry Asshole sprang up behind Genma and turned out to be a jounin she didn't know, wearing, oddly enough, bandages over his eyes. "He's alive," the jounin said laconically. "He was taken on ahead by the Hokage's apprentice."

"Sakura couldn't just heal him?" Ino was shaking like a fawn. "How fucking long was I out for?"

Genma flicked her in the nose, just hard enough to make her focus through the rampaging panic. "You were ambushed yesterday, we found you this morning, we're about two days from Konoha. She healed him up pretty good and she worked on your shoulder too, but whatever hit him was a little poisoned, so she's haulin' him back for Tsunade to work her magic. He'll live. Pink promised you. She told me to tell you that. Okay? So breathe or something."

"Right," she mumbled. The mental image of tiny Sakura hauling Chouji across Fire Country, like he was some kind of bloated damsel in distress, was very nearly hysterical, and Bandage Face made a worried sort of sound as she stifled her laughter. The knowledge that Sakura had come for her was warming, though. "I really thought I was dead," she said at last, sitting down with a thump, entirely uncaring of wasting time, now that she knew Chouji was in the very capable, monster-y hands of her superbly talented best friend.

"You almost were," Genma said cheerfully, shoving his mask up onto the top of his head and totally breaking Anbu code without a care. He looked sweaty and rumpled, but he grinned at her with the shared camaraderie of survivors. She decided to forgive him for his attempted groping last time she'd seen him in the marketplace; after all, she _had _looked very gropable at the time in her favorite skirt. "Not a drop of fucking chakra, dehydrated, practically all bled out when we found you. What the fuck were you two doin' in a field in the middle of nowhere?"

She frowned and reached for his canteen. He handed it over without argument, and she drank half of it in one gulp, sighing blissfully as she felt humanity return. The rest of the canteen, she dumped over her head, and that was even better on her grimy skin. She _stank._

"Oh," she said a moment later, scrubbing her hands over her damp face. "We _were_ in a tree when the fight ended. Uh, I tried to drag him a little. I was trying to get us home. Cho's heavy, though."

"Obviously," cut in Bandage Face, rather irritably. "We saw your trail. It's just you picked a very open place to pass out in again."

She glared at him. God, he was so familiar. Why couldn't she place him? She never forgot a face. "I wasn't exactly myself, fucking excuse me," she hissed. Anger hid the shame that burned hot in her gut. It was true, after waking up from her faint she'd barely gotten herself and Chouji two miles from Himura's compound, and first she'd wasted almost half an hour staring in empty horror at the still-weeping enemy below her, with his scrambled-egg brains. The memory of using that technique was ghastly enough to make her understand why her father hadn't ever offered to teach it to her.

Bandage Face just turned away haughtily, and the motion was enough for her to place him. He was one of her father's Interrogation coworkers. "Oh. Tonbo," she said, and now the shame was rising in one single hard lump to clutch at her throat. The clan would hear about just how poorly she'd performed on this mission even more quickly now, and they'd know they'd been right about her. Perfect.

"Yes," he returned shortly.

"How's my old man?" she said bitterly, rubbing her face again.

"Well," said Tonbo, turning his bandages in her direction. "Uh. He- why are you asking me about your own father?"

So perhaps he hadn't heard about the unceremonious ejection of his boss' disobedient, disappointing daughter from her clan, then. She blinked at him, then looked away and said nothing. She was too wrung out to bother trying to hide her trembling lower lip, though, and there was a beat of awkward silence before Genma ruffled her hair and picked her up again. She sighed, pushed his mask back into place for him, and kept her mouth shut as they headed back towards home and her boys.

"Listen," Genma began, muffled again behind his mask. "Clan stuff's messy and unfair and shit, I know, but maybe you oughta just do what your old man wanted, you know-"

"Finish that sentence and I'll tell Shizune about the drink you bought for that redhead last week," she said darkly.

Genma stayed quiet.

* * *

Sakura was very pale with huge dark circles under her eyes, obviously exhausted from her urgent trek across Fire Country, and the ugly green of her scrubs wasn't improving her appearance at all, but to Ino she was the most beautiful thing in the entire world.

She tried to find words, to thank Sakura for saving Chouji, but nothing came out except an embarrassing squeak, so Ino just launched herself at Sakura and swept her up in a brutal hug.

Sakura just patted her on the back and said, "It's okay. He's okay," over and over, until Ino got a hold of herself and pulled back.

"Damn. Guess I owe you one, forehead," she sniffed, in an effort to regain normalcy.

Sakura snorted and rolled her eyes. "Yeah you do, pig, he's heavy as hell. For starters I want those pink heels you bought for the festival last year."

Ino bit her lip, then gritted out painfully, "Fine. But only because it's Chouji, do you hear me? And if I ever want to borrow them back then I get to!"

Sakura waved a hand, smirking. "Right, right. Whatever. Crazy pig." They both grinned at each other, a little flushed and teary, ridiculously happy just to _look_ at each other.

"I'm so confused," Genma muttered from behind his mask, slouched against the gorgeously familiar white hospital wall of Chouji's room. "Why are they smiling?"

"It's a woman thing," Tsunade said sagely, running a hand through a pigtail. "Now get out. Good job, you two." Genma and Tonbo sprinted away immediately, radiating intense relief.

"How did you know we were in danger?" Ino wondered as Tsunade bundled her into a bed right beside Cho's and started to check her pulse and her chakra levels, before placing a cool, green-glowing hand to her shoulder yet again. Only an hour back into her hometown, she was still bloody, if already mostly healed up thanks to Tsunade, Ino stank like a whole stable of Suna camels, and she looked like death warmed over, but for once she didn't care. It was enough to watch Chouji's bandaged chest rise and fall as he slept. Even Sakura's raised eyebrow at her outfit didn't hurt. At least the grey boots were sort of cute, in an androgynous, overly practical kind of way. Sort of. Well, Ino's legs could make anything look good, right?

"Actually," Tsunade said briskly, "Every single Konoha team in the field was ambushed almost simultaneously." She raised a hand to forestall Ino's frantic questions. "Only two dead, miraculously, and no one you know. You were the only team unable to send us an update, so we went after you. Shikamaru's on his way. Chouji is going to be just fine, I removed the poison, and no, we have no idea who was targeting our ninja or why. Did I miss anything?"

Ino considered, sticking her tongue out obligingly for Tsunade's inspection. "Went into two of the enemy," she said once her tongue was her own again; the Hokage perked up visibly. "One of them, I didn't have time for any digging. I used him for fighting. The other though, I- I know who his daughter is, at least."

"How does that help?" Sakura wondered out loud.

Ino scowled. "Maybe she's got information about her dad, who he was working for. I don't know! It's something, right?" She tried to push away the broken sounds Umeko's father had made, rocking the dead body he believed to be his child's.

Tsunade was watching her narrowly; Ino tilted her face towards her Hokage, smiling. "I won," she said, trying to feel brave and brash, as was her trademark. "So it's okay, isn't it?"

Tsunade softened, but then, even as she took Ino's hand and squeezed, she said, "You'd have died and rotted alongside your teammate if we hadn't sent a team after you. Work on your strength, Ino."

Ino could have cheerfully died for real right then. She fisted her hands in the sheets of the bed until it hurt and stared at her bruised right knee with laser focus. Sakura slipped out of the room like a shadow, and Ino was grateful even as she was furious at Tsunade for speaking such words in front of her rival.

"You're right," she whispered, and nothing had ever been so bitter in her mouth, not even Kiba's atrocious attempt at cooking on their fourth date.

Tsunade clucked her tongue gently, gave Ino's hand a squeeze, took a last glance at Chouji, and followed Sakura from the room.

Ino stared at the ceiling until Shikamaru slunk in, and then, before, "Hello," or, "Yes, I'm all in one piece," or even, "Thanks for figuring out the whole ambush thing and saving my life," she said sharply, "Teach me. I want it now. I'm ready to work. I- I know I bitch and moan about being weaker than Sakura all the time but now I'm ready to do more than just cry about it, okay? Asuma told me not to lose to her and now I won't!"

He looked at her for a long time, measuring in that way only Shikamaru could do. "I've had someone else in mind to teach you, actually, someone with a little more free time than me, better suited for you and your skillset. Faster than me, and water nature like you. Besides, he owes me a favor," he said. "I was just sort of waiting, you know?"

"Okay." She trusted him instantly. Shikamaru knew everything, about everyone, and was never wrong. She did wish it was _him _who'd be helping her train, but Team Ten was already a bare, broken shadow of its former self, and he worked so hard now as a jounin. Probably she should have expected to have to turn away from her piecemeal team's familiar arms, but it still hurt.

He smiled crookedly at her limitless trust and took her hand, then Chouji's, connecting them. The curtains lining the open window fluttered as a gentle breeze blew in. "You're going to hate me quite a bit."

"Too late," she shot back, matching his sideways grin, and Team Ten sat united together for a long time before she fell asleep again, lulled by painkillers and safety.

She woke up to a scratching sound. When she opened her eyes blearily, Sai, of all people, was sitting in a chair beside the window of the room, framed against the setting sun, sketching away.

"Hello," she mumbled in utter confusion, grimacing and working her bone-dry mouth.

He gave that weird smile of his and handed her a cup of water that might as well have been a gift straight from the Kami above, considering how happy she was to get her hands on it. "Shikamaru Nara told me that you'd requested my presence," he said.

She sputtered. "What? Why the hell would- oh, dammit. Damn!"

The ridiculously false smile stayed perfectly put on his pale face. "Is there something wrong?"

Ino stared at him grimly. Not a muscle on him moved in the slightest. "At least you've stopped with the stupid nicknames," she mumbled, flushing a little in spite of herself. "I'm like ninety percent sure Shikamaru wants you to train me. Uh, I mean, if you have… time." Oh, this was so very painful. Ino's already battered pride gave a last whimper and died as she said, "Please? I really need to get better and my teammates are way past me now and I… don't have a sensei. Tsunade's got most of the jounin really busy, and- please?"

Sai just kept right on smiling. "I don't have much free time, but I know that friends often do favors for each other, regardless of how unpleasant it may be, so I'll help you as long as you don't mind meeting very early to train."

"How early?" she said warily.

"Five o'clock," he said cheerfully. "I don't have to report for duty until seven thirty, so we'll have plenty of time to work on all your many weaknesses."

She screamed silently into her pillow. "Fine!"

Sai rose to his feet and gathered up his sketchbook with weird, eerie grace that made her frown. He moved like he didn't have bones. "Fine. I shall see you tomorrow, then. Sakura informed me you'll be getting released tonight. Training Ground Seven." The false smile grew more enthusiastically deceptive. "I look forward to it, Ino."

"Bullshit you do, you heartless puppet," she grumbled to the ceiling. He was already gone. She resolved to punish Shikamaru heartily and well, every chance she got, regardless of whether or not this catastrophe worked.

She was almost ready to sneak out of this stupid hospital, hunt down Shika, and inform him that he _wasn't_ actually a genius, not if he thought working with Sai could possibly help her, but then Chouji gave an adorable snuffling snore and she couldn't stop grinning in relief.

* * *

The first day they trained together, Sai took unashamed advantage of her still depleted chakra and drowned her beneath a tsunami of ink lions until she begged for breath, and then he turned her black and blue from head to toe under the guise of 'taijutsu training'. Really, it was just him beating the crap out of her as she tried frantically to figure out where he was and what he was doing. Shikamaru was right, Sai was fast as hell. He made her feel like a genin fresh out of the Academy all over again. She couldn't touch him.

On the second morning, he goaded her relentlessly into running ten times around Konoha _while_ holding a clone, then he _laughed_ at her efforts during their sparring, then he dodged her enraged punches so easily that she stormed off, flinging curses at him that withered the grass of Training Grounds Seven.

The third day, she was sore and humiliated and unbelievably pissed off, and he just sat her down, let her rest, and spent the whole day trying to teach her a nasty water jutsu that would singe her enemies from the inside out, using their bodily fluids. She couldn't really _do_ it yet, which wasn't surprising, considering it was well above chuunin level, but she had the seals memorized, at least. She refused to give up hope.

"Why aren't you leaving?" she panted suspiciously, water roiling uncontrollably around her hands, when seven thirty rolled around and the sun was finally creeping up over the stone faces of the Hokages.

He crinkled his eyes at her. She scowled automatically, still uncomfortable. Something so fake felt like manipulation. "It's my day off, actually."

"You're spending your day off with me?" she squealed, aghast.

"Yes. Is that an issue?"

"Yes it's a damn issue, you utter moron! Days off are supposed to be spent relaxing or sleeping or something, not doing favors for people who- no, just, go home and do... whatever it is you do, Sai, and I'll work on the stuff you showed me yesterday, okay?"

He blinked at her in what was actually a fair copy of confusion. "Do you not want me to help you anymore? I thought you wanted to get stronger? I'd assumed it was for the jounin exams, so you could take them with your Akimichi teammate and stop being such a weak link..."

"I don't like to owe anyone," she practically shrieked, furiously ignoring that she was currently behind on both her electric _and_ her water bill, as well as the fact that she owed Sakura a free lunch due to a bet they'd made about a certain weapons mistress and Hyuuga prodigy.

"It's normal between friends to exchange favors, isn't it?" said Sai, painting a look of confusion on his face. "And- concentrate more on the flow of your chakra, not just the amount. This jutsu relies principally on fine control."

She snarled. "I'm trying!"

He breathed out slowly, watching the chakra swirling around her hands with dark narrow eyes. "Not much." He dodged her fist with smooth flexibility and kept dabbling his bare feet in the creek they were sitting by. "Pull up a little more water. Picture your chakra as a soft curve, nothing jagged. There's nothing sharp in water and it won't respond well if you try to bully it. There, that's slightly less terrible. We are friends, aren't we?"

She managed to coax up a little more river water and began to heat it up, but then her chakra flickered and it all fell with a splash. "I don't know!" she said in absolute frustration, dropping her head into her hands, feeling awkward and incompetent, two of her least favorite feelings ever. "I don't know you all that well but you agreed to do this stupid thing for me out of the blue and it's just- weird, okay?"

"Oh, I see," was all he said, smiling.

She eyed him. He was still as oddly, eerily handsome as he'd always been since popping up from nowhere and joining Team Kakashi, still as parchment pale as ever, with the same ink stains tattooed on his hands. He hadn't changed much in the time she'd known him. He still regularly incensed people to the point of violence and he still said the most absolutely inappropriate things imaginable- Sakura often updated Ino on Sai's social failures out of a sheer need to vent her fury- and his smile was still as unwaveringly, pathetically false as ever.

"Crinkle the muscles beneath your eyes. No, like you're squinting at something far away. Relax your lips a little bit. Less teeth. That's better. That's more like a real smile, one that takes up your whole face. It's really tiny muscles that make a smile look real." When he didn't say anything, she demonstrated. "Fake smile. See? And… A real one."

He frowned a little. "Ah. You know, I thought I'd experienced a true smile several times before now. I thought I was getting better at it."

"Really? You?" She eyed him skeptically. She'd surely never seen such a thing. "Maybe you have. I mean, I hope so! It's really hard to fake a smile, though, if you aren't really feeling it in the moment. It's not just your face you have to fake. It's your body language and voice too. And there are about a hundred different kinds of smiles. So don't feel too bad about it, it's tricky."

He dipped a finger in the water, then drew a wet butterfly on one of the sun-warmed rocks lining the stream; it flapped its wings a few times before evaporating gently away. He did a little mouse next, and then an oversized ant. She supposed that doodling was his way of being pensive or something, because he didn't say anything for a while and he wrinkled his nose like he was thinking. Finally she just said pityingly, "Look, all your fake smiles do is creep me out, so how about we make a deal? You quit using them on me and I'll help you act less, uh… wooden? And it'll be part payback for helping me train." In her head she added timidly, delicately, _train for the jounin exams, _a brand new goal almost too fragile to be fully formed. With that green vest, though, ugly as it was, she might be able to face her clan without crumbling. Maybe they'd even take her back. Maybe.

He stared at her, stone faced. It looked a thousand times more genuine. She beamed at him. "Deal," he said.

"Deal. Ooh, I think the water's getting hotter!" Her glee was interrupted by an ominous shaking of earth coming from somewhere behind him, and when the breeze brought the scent of sake and the sound of shouts, Ino stood up with a gulp. "That's not good."

Sai edged behind a tree. "No, definitely not. I've noticed she's even more violent when she's intoxicated."

Right on cue, the Hokage herself came stomping up, and the vein thumping in her forehead and the trio of Anbu escorting her had Ino praying for mercy.

"Ino Yamanaka," Tsunade hissed, brandishing what Ino recognized as her mission report for the failed ambush in Wave. "Am I to understand that one of the enemy was left _alive_?"

Ino winced and shifted her weight. "I- ah- yes, ma'am? Alive… Ish."

"Ish!" Tsunade roared. "You left alive a man who was part of an organized attack on every single damn team in the field, every _single_ team, and you didn't think to inform me of this possible source of vital information?"

Even the Anbu behind Tsunade somehow managed to look sympathetic behind their masks, and Sai had completely disappeared behind his tree. Ino gulped and battled down the urge to run for her life. "I- I did put it in the report, ma'am? I fatally injured him. He- I didn't think about that. The information. I was thinking about my teammate. I'm truly very sorry." She said the last in a whisper and dropped into a low bow, holding it, mostly so she could hide her flushed face. Ino could handle being screamed at, because, as her mother often said, it wasn't fair to dish it out if you couldn't take it too, but Tsunade took scoldings to a whole new level. It was even worse because she deserved it.

Tsunade ripped the mission report entirely in half with a strangled hiss and spent the next five minutes pacing and breathing deeply, obviously attempting to get a handle on her temper. At last she turned back to Ino- who was still bowing out of self-preservation, regardless of how it hurt her back- and snapped, "What exactly was the fatal wound you inflicted, because that wasn't in the report?"

Ino stalled, gripping the edge of her skirt tight. "I- ah- well, you see, it, ah, it leads to death by exposure, it's, um, incapacitating and leads to eventual death by exposure-"

Tsunade's scarlet-painted toes curled warningly and her nostrils flared. "Is there any chance at all the man is still alive and could be retrieved for interrogation, Ino? Because right now my village is dead in the water, no one can take any missions, and we have no idea if we're going to be targeted here at home next or who our enemy is!"

Ino gritted her teeth and counted the days mentally. When she'd awoken from her initial faint and started to try and drag Cho home, to the field where Genma and the others had found them, Umino's father had still been clutching the corpse he believed to be his daughter, but he'd managed to crawl into the shadows, and she was pretty sure she remembered seeing a canteen of water on his hip. Exactly how effective was that jutsu she'd used?

She shut her eyes and tried to remember what the scroll she'd learned it from had said, tried to remember exactly how much cognitive function remained in the victim, but she'd memorized the damn thing while crouching in her family's dusty vault, clutching a torch and listening frantically for footsteps. It hadn't been the best learning environment. "It's been seven days since I… injured him, ma'am," she said, diplomatically skipping over the fact that the injury was from a secret clan jutsu that she'd stolen. "I'm honestly not sure if he has the… mental capacity to drink water or move out of the sun. So it's a maybe. I am certain he's where I left him or very close, though, unless someone physically dragged him away. But he was the only enemy left alive, as far as we know. I have no idea if anyone would return for him."

Tsunade growled and tapped a foot impatiently on the ground, which split open and nearly took out one of the Anbu. "I'm going to find out whatever sneaky, underhanded trick you pulled as soon as I get my hands on that man whether he's dead or alive, Ino, so you'd better grow a pair and tell me before these gentlemen retrieve him, understand?" Ino quailed and nodded meekly. When the Anbu squad behind her didn't immediately leap into action, Tsunade turned with lightning speed and started towards them dangerously, fists clenched; they melted into the ground instantly, presumably to go collect Ino's maybe-dead victim.

Satisfied, Tsunade shook a warning finger at Ino for final emphasis and wandered off, the telltale glint in her eye that spoke of a really impressive upcoming bender on the way.

Ino plumped down weakly in the grass the moment the Hokage was out of sight, whimpering and clutching her head. This was an absolute disaster, chaos, horrible! She couldn't hope for that man she'd demolished to _not_ be found alive, because he might be able to help Konoha, but a little part of her very much wanted Anbu to not find him. He was evidence of her theft, and as justified as she secretly felt it was, her parents wouldn't agree, and since she was no longer an official member of the clan, they would legally be able to press charges on her if they wanted.

"Ino," Sai said, creeping cautiously out from behind his tree like a lizard. "That was unpleasant. Why would you deliberately do something that would put you in so much danger? It seems foolish, especially for a ninja."

"I didn't do it on purpose, I just didn't think about it!" she said plaintively, curling up into a ball. "I'm seriously fucked. There's no hope for me now. I'm gonna have to go back to that- that dragon lady and throw myself on her mercy and she _has_ no mercy. Put yellow carnations on my grave."

"Hmmm." Sai's face stayed as impassive as ever, but he stared off at the horizon for a moment, arms crossed.

"Confused?" she said wryly, still lying on the ground like the worm she was. Normally she'd never act so undignified in front of anyone, but Sai was such an idiot that he'd never see her actions as the expression of complete and utter defeat that they were. It was weirdly comforting, really. She sniffled and put her face under her arm, trying in vain to picture situations in which she confessed to her theft and Tsunade _didn't_ eviscerate her and then hang her disgraced, beaten body off the Hokage Tower.

"I am usually confused around women," Sai said bluntly, coming over to sit back beside the river and dunk his feet.

She snorted in spite of herself. "Well, at least in that way you're a normal boy."

"It's normal to be confused by the opposite gender?"

"So normal you wouldn't believe, Sai, trust me." She sat up with a gusty sigh and pulled her knees to her chest.

"That's very depressing to hear," he mumbled.

Well, his severe social handicap was all very sad and tragic, but right now Ino had bigger things looming over her and she wasn't going to waste a captive listener and a chance to vent a little. God knew she needed it. "You know what's depressing? The fact that I'm probably going to get prosecuted by my own family for stealing a jutsu that would have been mine someday anyway if they weren't a bunch of old-fashioned losers," she groused, grinding her teeth. "And they wouldn't even listen to anything I said when they kicked me out, and I'm their _daughter_ and all the clan elders were total jerks about the whole thing! But you know, I got over it, but then this stupid mission went up in flames, I didn't get _paid, _and now everything is going to get even worse for me!" She threw her hands in the air and added a few choice curse words she'd picked up from Kankurou on a Suna mission .

Sai blinked that slow, contemplative blink of his again, and then he grabbed her by the ankles, yanked her sandals off so fast it looked like a jutsu, dragged her forward, and dunked her bare legs in the creek.

"What the hell," she screeched, flailing.

He ducked her swipes easily, and she just _knew_ he was itching to fake-smile at her. "I read once that if you share something you find relaxing with a friend, they might come to see it the same way."

She glowered, but desisted in her attempts to tear his hair out. "You're trying to tell me to quit stressing out by getting my feet wet?"

"I- yes, exactly." He sounded a little surprised. Idiot, to think he didn't have emotions at all. They were there, as plain to her as the nose on his pale face, they were just sort of diluted and backwards and showed up in unexpected ways. She told him so, irritably, wriggling her toes in the cool water, and he hummed thoughtfully before dabbing another butterfly onto his rock.

"Go on, try that water jutsu again," he said after a while.

"Only if you stop reading dumb books that make you think dumb things."

"What does my research have to do with your training? I'm confused again, it seems."

"Ugh! _Fine_!"


	4. Chapter 4

Ino was soaking in her cramped bathtub that evening, trying to boil away the ache from her muscles and the worry from her nerves, when she caught the crisp rapping on her door that could only be Sakura. "Five minutes," she bellowed, dunking under to rinse the hydrangea-scented conditioner out of her hair.

When she wandered out into her living room, hair turbaned in a towel so it didn't instantly soak the back of her pajamas, Sakura was sitting comfortably on her tattered couch, flipping through a weapon catalogue.

Ino crossed her arms. "Did I _say_ you could come in?"

Sakura snorted. "I picked the lock. You really need to set some traps."

Ugh. "I know, I know, I've been busy, okay?" Ino plopped down beside Sakura and proceeded to glare.

Sakura only raised a brow, licked her finger, and flipped another page. "New razor wire. Chakra-resistant, extra flexible, ten-mission warranty," she read out loud, apparently entirely absorbed. "Interesting."

Ino sighed, spared a rueful moment to wonder why exactly she'd worked so hard to teach Sakura how to properly get under people's skin, and then broke. "Everything's all fucked up and my life is ruined and your teacher is going to skin me alive, okay? Did you come here to gloat or what?"

Sakura blinked and set the catalogue down. "No, Tsunade was all pissed off and she told me to come talk to you, so I did. I was worried."

Ino glowered stormily. "So sweet of you. I think I'm getting diabetes."

"If you're going to be a bitch I'll just leave." Yet Sakura didn't move a muscle. This was a familiar dance for them both, comforting even as it was aggravating, but jabbing at each other was the only way they really knew to get close.

"Fine. Okay, well-" Ino vaguely wondered where to even start. "You heard about why I moved out of my parents' place, right?"

"I heard a little," Sakura admitted, fiddling with the ends of her hair.

"I'll trim that for you before you go, you're getting all ragged again. Did you hear the part where they wanted me to become a full time nurse and quit field missions?"

Sakura's dropped jaw was bitterly satisfying. "_What?_ You're kidding me, you're such a daddy's girl, there's no way he'd do that to you! That doesn't make any sense. Why? They were so proud when you made chuunin!"

Ino shrugged and pulled the towel out of her hair, wandering off to her bathroom to grab a comb and using the interruption as a convenient time-out in which to murder any burgeoning tears. Sakura grabbed the comb immediately when Ino came back out and sat her down in front of the couch, brushing through her hair slowly, if not skillfully. "He didn't want to," Ino mumbled, staring at her outstretched legs. She hadn't had time to shave. "It's just technically I'm the only heiress or whatever, because our clan's so small, and they weren't satisfied with me. My grandma said that the best thing I'd ever manage to be is a nurse and a mother, that I wasn't a good enough ninja. They said that if I died in the field it would be a huge setback for the clan. The end of it, because my parents are too old to have another baby and… well, we're a really small clan. They didn't want us to die out and I'm the only ninja in this generation. My aunts and uncles all married out of the clan. None of my cousins got the bloodline limit and everyone else is getting older or already died." The words burned as they passed her tongue, but she felt lighter at the same time.

"Fuck," Sakura said slowly, bringing out one of her rarely used profanities. "Fuuuuuck."

"Yeah. It wasn't even a huge deal at first, you know? They just kind of… my mom just brought it up over tea. As an alternative.. I think she thought I was just waiting for an excuse to stop active duty. I kept telling her that was a stupid idea and then my grandparents got involved, and then my dad, and we ended up screaming at each other." She shrugged again and swallowed hard, keeping her head bowed beneath the sheet of her hair. "I've never yelled at him like that. Not at anybody."

"Yeah, but you yell at lot," Sakura mumbled, working through a particularly rebellious tangle with the same delicate restraint she adopted on the battlefield while smashing mountains.

Wincing as her abused scalp began to ache and wondering just _how _many complaints had been filed about Sakura's bedside manner, Ino shook her head slightly and tried not to remember details. "No, this was really mean stuff. I left the next day."

"That's different than what I thought it would be," Sakura murmured. "I thought it was just a normal fight, like how they always want you to work more hours at the flower shop. It all boils down to you being the only one in your generation to get the bloodline limit, then? And they don't want to risk you dying and the clan hitting a dead end?" Ino nodded glumly. Trust Sakura to distill the whole mess down into a nice, neat, seemingly simple soundbite and entirely take away all the emotional turmoil that went with it. For a highly emotional person, Sakura also had an almost unnerving way of paring problems down to their barest, most pragmatic bones. It was probably Tsunade's influence. "So that's why you started training with Sai. So you can kick ass and rub it in your stupid family's faces?" She smiled hugely and waggled her eyebrows. "That should be easy enough for you, as long as you quit worrying about chipping a nail."

Ino grinned helplessly and felt herself get hopelessly gushy and girly in the face of her sometime-rival's prickly support. It was wonderfully normal. "Yeah. Hey, stay the night? We can do mani-pedi's and drown in ice cream."

Sakura sighed. "I can't. I have a mission in the morning. I just wanted to come by and see how you were."

"Oh. Okay." Ino tried very hard not to feel disappointed. "Careful, god, wet hair is the most prone to breaking, you know that!"

"Right," Sakura said dryly, tugging harder with the comb.

"Clearly your lame boy haircut has robbed you of the ability to appreciate my gorgeous _feminine _hair," Ino barked, cringing as she heard a few wet strands audibly snap.

Sakura ignored that. "Doesn't tell me why Tsunade's so fired up, though. She went through like half a sake store today. I'm considering investing in one. Buying stock or something."

"She doesn't know all the details yet, she suspects, but I may or may not have used a Yamanaka jutsu on one of the guys who ambushed us," Ino admitted with entirely false bravado. She even threw a little laugh in there for effect, waving her hand. "It's great, left the guy a drooling cross-eyed idiot. My dad's such a jerk for not teaching it to me a long-"

"You _stole_ it? A secret clan jutsu? After you were officially disowned? Ino, that's bad! That's way bad!" Sakura squealed, dropping the comb.

"I am aware of that fact," Ino snapped icily. "I took it before I moved out. Had to get something out of the whole clusterfuck, right?" She'd been so angry, so white-hot hurt, without any clue what to do in the world now that the rug of her loving family had been ripped out from under her. She'd committed the crime in a daze of hatred and temper and now she was paying, all right.

Sakura slid off the couch onto the floor beside Ino. "Are you- crying?" she said awkwardly a moment later.

"No, definitely not," Ino squeaked.

"Oh. Okay then." Sakura hemmed and hawed for a moment, then said slowly, "I'll come with you to talk to Tsunade if you want. I'll be back tomorrow night or the morning after at the latest. That's completely unfair what your clan said to you. The jutsu thing- well, you did it during battle to save your teammate, and at the time you stole it you would've still been clan, right? The paperwork hadn't been filed yet? So it wasn't illegal at the time you did it. Maybe that'll be a loophole."

"If you want," Ino mumbled into her knees, wondering if she was even still legally allowed to use her last name. "I'll wait until you're back in town, if you're so eager to watch Tsunade rip me to pieces."

"Can't wait for the bloodbath," Sakura chuckled, pulling Ino roughly into an extra-tight hug and ignoring her yelp before heading to the door.

"Be careful, don't catch a kunai in that giant forehead of yours," Ino called.

Sakura flipped her off and slammed the door. "Keep your grabby hands off Sai!" floated through the walls.

Ino grinned and wiped her face on her knees. Maybe there was a ray of hope somewhere in this mess. Next time she saw Shikamaru, she could tell him she'd learned her lesson about feeling entitled to things that weren't hers, and he'd be proud of her. God knew he'd been trying to drum that into her head for years; apparently it only took the threat of severe legal repercussions for her to get it.

She still had to murder him slowly for getting her stuck with _Sai_ as a makeshift sensei, of course, but he'd be proud.

* * *

She woke up the next morning still sore as hell. There were aches and pains in muscles she hadn't felt in years, and she spent a good ten minutes staring at her yellowed ceiling and cursing Sai silently and inventively, and then herself a little for mucking everything up. It was only the smell of her mother's favorite apple blossom detergent, still lingering on Ino's quilt, that got her angry enough to propel herself out of bed. If she tortured herself long enough, there _had_ to be results, right? And Shikamaru certainly wouldn't be proud of her if she dropped out of her extra specia, kickass revenge training regimen only a few days in.

To her utter surprise, when she dragged herself to Training Grounds Seven, Sai was there, leaning patiently against a tree and staring at the ground.

She joined him, wincing as her calves twinged. To think, she'd actually imagined herself in fair shape. "I've decided I passionately hate you and also I hurt all over. What are you looking at and why are you here?"

He stared right through her, leaning back a little. "You hate me? Then you've decided we're not friends?"

She caught his retreating body language and frowned. "No, I'm sorry, I was being sarcastic. Teasing?" He just kept staring. How on earth could the boy be on a team with Naruto and not yet understand jokes? She knew for a fact he regularly made fun of Naruto's dick, which made her suspicious that he was being deliberately dense. If it hadn't been for his tight shoulders she would have pinched him, just to be safe. "I was complaining because my legs hurt, I don't hate you," she groaned in exasperation, rubbing her temples. Did he think about anything but friends?

He relaxed, rubbing a gloved hand over the back of his neck. "Ah. I'm looking at that beetle. It's very colorful. Why wouldn't I be here for your training?"

"Sakura's on a mission, I just sort of figured you'd be going with her."

"Not on this one. Yamato was sent with her."

"Oh." She crouched down to examine the beetle from a safe distance. "Iridescent, cool. Could you paint something like that? I'd kill for nail polish that color." The beetle, which was uncomfortably large, made a buzzing noise, and she scrambled backwards with a screech.

Sai made a breathy sound through his nose. Laughter? She squinted skeptically at him; he was still wearing a perfect poker face, the one he seemed to fall into naturally now that she'd forbidden him from fake-smiling at her. "I could attempt it," he said at length. "Living things are the most difficult for me to draw."

"You draw lions and stuff all the time for fighting," she pointed out.

"They're stylized," he murmured. "Living things have emotions. I can copy the physical appearance of a person perfectly, for example, but I've been told on occasion that my portraits lack feeling, despite their technical accuracy. It's part of why I favor abstracts."

She got to her feet and brushed leaves and dirt off her bottom, eyeing the beetle, which was placidly crawling up a tree trunk now, waving its feelers. "It's a beetle. I doubt it's got much emotion, though you'd have to ask Shino, and it's pretty. I bet you could do it." Honestly she was curious. She'd never seen him draw anything but his ink battle monsters. All she knew about his skill in more traditional art came from Sakura and Naruto's impressed ravings.

Really- now that she thought about it- what _did_ she know about him? He'd materialized from the shadows of Konoha, from nowhere, and nobody had ever seen him before, not in the Academy or any of the exams or even just buying a stick of dango.

She took a moment to look him up and down, the way she would investigate a brand new person, and he just stood there placidly, so calm that she didn't bother to hide her staring. No scars at all on that pale skin of his, indicating prodigious talent and probably a generous helping of luck, but fingers stratified with callouses beneath the ink smudges. Neatly trimmed nails, clean, carefully mended clothing, and a hitai-ate tied perfectly level above blank eyes. Everything about him was neat and clean and _unnatural_, like he'd been bleached all away by the merciless Konoha sun to a beautiful, grinning skeleton.

Her father would distrust him on sight. "A person without a past is a person hiding their past," he'd always told her.

"Were you born here, Sai?" she said. "It's only that no one remembers you growing up, you know, even though you must have gone to the Academy? And you're pretty good, so you'd think someone would remember you."

He leaned away again. "Thank you."

She blinked. "I- huh?"

"For the compliment. Expressing gratitude for a positive assessment of one's self is the done thing, is it not?" he said, and his face lifted into a smile for a moment, in the same instinctual way Ino would play with her hair or Sakura would fiddle with her gloves.

Ino smiled back, more barbed this time. If he wanted to play she'd show him how a master did it. He was used to sidling around people and their curiosity about him, was he? Too bad. "What a nice, neat way to avoid my question," she mused. "Which means there's something you don't want me to know. Too obvious, Sai. It's only made me more interested."

Sai shrugged a little and settled into a combat stance. "Let's spar. I'll go slower today so that you have a chance to hit me and learn the techniques more completely."

Another deflection, and this time he was very deftly dangling her desires over her head, incentive for her to stop her questioning. She narrowed her eyes at him mercilessly and his shoulders bunched, shifted. Satisfied that he'd gotten her message, she relented for the moment and moved to follow his lead.

He was true to his word, though, and he held back enough that she actually managed to keep up with him, working through the moves he'd begun to teach her the other day. "You need to keep your defense up," he called, popping her gently on the cheek to illustrate his point.

"I thought I was," she faltered. She'd kept her hands up, hadn't she?

He shook his head and slowed to a stop; she was irritated to notice he wasn't panting at all, but she was. "You're doing it halfway. You're doing all of this halfway. You overthink it and it hinders your movements from being what they should."

She raised an eyebrow at him, confused. No had ever told her anything like that about her taijutsu, not Asuma or Shika or her dad. Mostly she'd been told she needed to work on her speed and power, if anything. She opened her mouth to argue, but then she thought about the way Sai moved when he fought, slickly precise, predatory and perfectly calculated all at the same time. He made it look like a song, attacking without the slightest hesitation or wasted motion, and honestly? She wanted that. She wanted to strut onto the battlefield and be a beautiful destroyer and be _feared_.

When she nodded assent, Sai went on placidly. "We'll keep doing this until it's muscle memory. It'll help your speed, too. Once you get these sequences down we'll start improvising."

"Muscle memory, huh," she muttered dubiously.

His face twitched as he only just held back a smile. "You can do it."

"Your faith warms my heart," she grumbled. "Okay, let's try it again." This time, she took a moment to breathe deep, even though his fist was currently hurtling at her face, and she managed to note the tenseness in his right thigh soon enough to skid beneath the kick that followed his punch.

"Better," he murmured, adjusting his gloves. "Try and follow up this time with that one-two offense." They repeated their movements, and this time she could _see _it, how her dodging his kick put him in a vulnerable position, and she drove her elbow towards the back of his head with vicious glee.

He got out of the way easily, of course, but he had a funny tilt to his eyebrows that she resolved to figure out. "Good," he said placidly.

"Thanks," she said happily, though she restrained herself from outright preening.

He promptly proceeded to send her flying into a tree, effectively smooshing her happy feelings to so much dust.

* * *

Shikamaru was carrying a stack of paperwork that wobbled higher than his head when she spied him inside the Hokage's tower, and the look on his face spoke of a deep, desperate need for nicotine. She grimaced, then set her shoulders and rounded the corner.

"Shiiiika," she purred.

His eyebrows drew together and he stared at her for a long, long moment. "No," he said at last.

"You know that word doesn't work on me," she said reprovingly. "And to think they call you a genius."

He heaved a gusty sigh and plopped his paperwork onto the floor beside the desk he'd commandeered a few months ago, after he'd finally accepted the horrifying fact that he'd somehow become one of Tsunade's many abused, overworked minions. "What do you want?"

"A mission. Something with a decent paycheck." She still had a hitai-ate to replace. "Help me out, Shika," she crooned, batting her eyelashes outrageously in the way she knew was most likely to both irritate him and make him want her out of his sight as quickly as possible.

As expected, he looked entirely disgusted. "Go look on the missions board."

She scowled and sat on his desk. "The gates are closed right now until the whole ambush thing gets straightened out, you know that, the only missions on the board are cat fetching and window washing, stuff in the village."

"So go wash windows."

"I'd need to do like twenty of those lame genin missions to make my bills." She leaned over his desk and opened a drawer, squinting in dismay at the tangled mass of paperclips, rubber bands, gnawed pencils, and half-empty cigarette cartons littering it. "I need something good. With money. And also I'd like to be out of the village when Anbu bring back the guy I forgot to kill."

Shikamaru lifted a brow at her light tone and slammed the drawer closed with one foot, leaning his chair back against the wall to better glower at her and lacing his hands behind his head. "No way. I'll get you a few of the better at-home missions to help with the bills but there's no way in hell you're sneaking out of the village. Sakura's been sweet-talking Tsunade for the past three days and I think she's coming around to your side a little. There's still hope you might live."

She rolled her eyes extravagantly, ignoring the aggressive tightness around his mouth that spoke of just how annoyed he was that she wouldn't allow him to help her with her family issues. Instead she picked up his hand, playing idly with his nicotine-stained fingers for a moment. She wasn't the only one who did stupid things with eyes wide open on Team Ten, after all, and it wouldn't do for him to forget that. "Yeah, that's kinda what I figured you'd say. So what's that favor that Sai owed you, anyway?"

He snatched his hand back and flapped it, yawning. "I helped him get some information on seals a while back."

"Seals? What on earth for?"

Shikamaru shrugged carefully and she instantly filed this particular line of questioning away as incomplete and intriguing. Maybe it had something to do with whatever Sai had been so concerned with keeping a secret. "Because he needed to know. Did you want anything else or are you content just to harass me and keep me from working?"

"As if you plan on working once I leave. We both know you're just going to take a nap."

He eyed her from under drooping lids. "So?"

"So I learned a new jutsu. A totally legal one. It's really nasty and awesome." She felt like a little kid saying it, bragging, but she wanted to make sure he knew she was still training. Probably the pained way she was walking, like she'd been run over by a herd of Naruto clones, had already tipped him off, but oh well.

"Congratulations," he drawled. "Shall I get Cho's mom to bake you a cake?"

"Bastard." They both smiled. She smacked him lovingly on the arm as she hopped off his desk. "Missions?"

He handed her two manila folders before she could even blink. "Building repair at the water plant and cleaning out the mews. Better paying than anything up on the board. They weren't supposed to be posted until tomorrow, so don't say I never did anything for you."

She hit him again, less lovingly. Dirty, filthy, laborious, tedious jobs- "Dammit, Shika!"

"Hey, don't shoot the messenger," he mumbled, eyes already drifting shut as he leaned back a little further, slouching into the early morning sunshine slanting through his window. She considered kicking over his stack of neglected paperwork, considered it _hard_, but then she remembered she was trying to be mature or whatever, so she didn't. She settled for smacking him one last time before she left. At least with easy missions like these, within the walls of Konoha, it wouldn't raise any eyebrows that she wasn't wearing her hitai-ate.

The water plant repair turned out to be an entire wall down, taken out a few days ago by some squabbling chuunin and a stray fireball. She sighed, mildly thankful that she hadn't bothered to change out of her workout clothes after sparring with Sai this morning, and went on the hunt for a trowel, a wheelbarrow, and cement.

Seven hours later, sunburned and sweaty, she tromped back to the tower to collect her pay, picking futilely at the pale crumbs of dried cement smeared all over her clothing. Of course, there was Sakura, lurking at the entrance, looking clean and fresh and irritatingly pretty. Ino resolved to be heartbreakingly gorgeous the next time they hung out, just out of principle.

"Pig," Sakura said at once, nearly leaping on Ino. "Oh god. They found him, he was still alive, he's in the hospital right now being treated for exposure and Tsunade and your dad are waiting for you in her office."

Ino shoved Sakura away in pure fright and pressed her back against the cool brick of the tower. "You're fucking kidding me," she gasped. She wasn't ready. She hadn't had time to play every thing that he might say out in her head and come up with devastating rejoinders. Was this what a heart attack felt like? She felt like Chouji _looked _after he gave in and hit up the buffet downtown; sweaty, green, ill, and generally near death.

"I wish. I was just about to go and get you." Sakura took Ino's hand, very tightly. "Come on. I already told Tsunade I'm staying when you're in there and there isn't a damn thing she or your dad can do about it."

"Shit. Shit, oh, shit, shit." Ino cussed steadily under her breath while they marched up the winding tower steps to Tsunade's office, a mindless outlet of sheer necessity; it was either profanity or run screaming. She didn't even realize her hands were glowing with nervous chakra until Sakura, hastily fixing her hair outside the Hokage's door, gave her a sharp glance, and Ino forced it down under her skin again, grinding her teeth. Of course she'd be ambushed by her father in one of the few moments where she looked like a total slob.

"Hang on," she muttered. Sakura squeezed her hand again and then let go. Ino counted to ten, silently, put a hand over the angry red scar on her shoulder, and when she slipped through the door, she was so cool and calm on the outside that Tsunade actually raised a brow.

Well, she felt cool and calm, anyway. She was trying. It was entirely possible that Tsunade was aghast at the red-faced, sweaty, twitchy blonde who'd just staggered into her office, but Ino would keep aiming for cool.

She kept her eyes on her father's knees when she turned towards him. Meeting his eyes would be too awful. "Hey there, daddy," Ino said brashly, edging closer to cold and grinning at him with the smile that everyone had always said was the exact copy of his own. To her mixed triumph and agony, his hands, hanging between his knees, clenched at her voice, though the rest of him stayed Yamanaka still. She flexed her fingers like claws, feeling like a cornered dog. She'd run if she could, but if he wanted to trap her in the Hokage's office and cut off her exits, he deserved what was coming to him.

His hands tensed again, and she bit her tongue.

"Hello," Inoichi said tonelessly. She noticed, with an unwanted pang, that he looked tired as she finally dared to examine his face. For the life of her, she couldn't make her mouth work well enough to speak a single word.

"Ino," Tsunade said briskly, apparently tiring of the drama. "Your father's going to interrogate the man you _failed_ to kill. Hopefully we'll get some clarity on this blasted ambush situation and Konoha can come out from hiding."

Ino fell back on her usual irreverent attitude and arched an eyebrow, aware that her expression was skittering just on the edge of rudely insubordinate, but her father's presence was like an inferno beside her and she couldn't be anything _less_ without breaking. "Well, that's good, isn't it?" At least her voice sounded sort of close to normal, now that she'd gotten it working.

Tsunade snarled something under her breath and reached out to grab an empty sake dish, apparently out of habit, turning it around and around in her hand. "Whatever you did to that man caused physical damage to his frontal _and _temporal lobes. They look like swiss cheese. It's irreparable and it's cruel as hell and it may make interrogation a lost cause, which has obvious consequences for our village. That's a jutsu I haven't seen since the Third War and I know for a fact it's a Yamanaka specialty." She stared at her sake dish, then added, "He keeps calling for his daughter. Thinks she's dead."

Inoichi sighed audibly and Ino knew instantly that he'd figured out her theft. He'd told Ino, gradually over the years, all the stories about the things he'd done in the war- slipping into the minds of children and using their tiny hands to kill their sleeping parents, turning best friends, lovers, family all against each other, twisting memories until soldiers from the other side turned to murdering their comrades, all the more cruelly because they believed themselves justified. It couldn't be nice for him, hearing that his daughter had begun to dabble in the same kind of work. It was their blessing and their curse, all at once.

Sakura pressed a comforting hand against the small of Ino's back, silent support, and Ino drank it up desperately as she lifted her chin. "When I learned it, I was still a Yamanaka," she said. In truth, it was her only defense- Sakura had been right, as smart as ever. Tsunade was quiet, so Ino turned to her father, ignoring as best as she could the ache his expressionless face caused in her heart. "You didn't put the paperwork to expel me from the clan through for at least a week after I moved out. I learned that jutsu the night before I left. If you prosecute me on this I don't think you'll win. It'll just make us both look bad, no? And a dying clan should pass in dignity, don't you think?" She was blustering now, outright bluffing out of fear, and the chill in Inoichi's eyes told her he knew it. He could read her like a book he'd written.

But then he surprised her. "I didn't put the paperwork through because I thought you'd come home. We didn't mean to force you out," he said tightly. She tilted back further against Sakura and commanded her legs to quit wobbling. "Shikamaru won't tell me where you're living now. All I know is that Tonbo had to go rescue you and Chouji and you were-"

Suddenly she wanted to run at him, hug him, beg him to let her come home. It hurt so much that she lost her breath. She could _feel _herself weakening, backsliding with every word her beloved daddy spoke, and the want to just give in was so strong that she reached desperately for the best armor she knew. "Going to say I told you so?" she bit out, leaning against the wall and examining her nails as if she _weren't _a heartbeat away from tears and shrieking, stealing one of Shikamaru's laziest postures. Incidentally, it stretched the shoulder straps of her tank top and put her brand new scar on display, false bravado, but necessary for her at the moment. She wondered foggily when on earth everything about her life had gone so backwards, even as her mouth kept forging on. "Go ahead. Say anything you want. Nothing you say means anything to me anymore." She curled her toes. That had backfired. It stung her just as much as it was meant to sting her father.

"We were right," he snapped, rising to his feet, a long lock of blonde hair slipping over one shoulder. "Your mother and I, your grandmother, all of us. You can't possibly think you're justified in this childish behavior when you _did_ turn around and almost die! The clan needs you, Ino, nothing can happen to you!" The last was desperate. Almost, she could hope he meant: _I _need you.

She clenched her jaw as tight as she possibly could to keep from screaming. Instead she shrugged and gave him a little smile, praying she didn't look as shaken as she really was inside. He must really be distracted, to give her the opening he just had- during their first fight, the one that had precipitated her leaving, he'd been the smoothly vicious one, carefully and precisely opening her all over with razor words. But now it was her turn to break him apart. "Why on earth would you be concerned about the death of a nameless chuunin?" she wondered with false sweetness, twisting the knife. "Is it because you drove out the last of your clan? My, what a _poor _decision that was. Ironic, too, because now it's _really _over. A clan without any offspring is pretty short lived, at least as far as I understand the birds and the bees-" What the hell was she _doing_, this was her _dad-_

"Ino," Tsunade said severely. It was a sharp relief.

Exhaling, Ino regarded her as levelly as she could, leaning on Sakura's hand even more.. "Yes, ma'am. I…" New and improved, not-a-weak-link Ino would be brave, an honorable shinobi. "I'm ready to take whatever punishment you see fit for my actions."

Now it was Tsunade's turn to leap for the jugular, and she did it with far less hesitation. "For your carelessness and stupidity in leaving a potentially valuable enemy alive and not directly reporting it to me, you're suspended from anything higher than C-rank for the next month and you're strictly contained to the village." Which meant it would be a hell of a time trying to scrape up enough missions to pay her rent. "Secondly, you're going to be helping your father interrogate said prisoner. Understand?"

Worse punishment than she'd ever imagined. "Yes," Ino said, reminding herself over and over; head up, shoulders relaxed, hips cocked, fingers curled slightly, smooth cheeks. She could feel her dad staring at her and she wouldn't give him another inch, not if it killed her. He would see no weakness. He'd wanted a stronger daughter and she'd damn well give it to him. "Yes, I understand. Was there anything else, Hokage?"

Tsunade sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. "No. Get out."

Ino took a second to flash her father's own smile back at him, and then she left with a carefully careless sweep of her long golden hair that was just like his. The instant she left the room, she gasped, eyes watering, and she stumbled down the stone steps as fast as she could without falling.

Sakura looked appalled by the whole performance, tagging along broodingly with a furrowed brow. "Ino, that was your _dad_," she said at last, as Ino, ever so slightly more contained, was collecting her paltry pay for the water plant repair in the billing office downstairs.

"I know," Ino said miserably, peeling more cement from her shirt. "I- that's why I had to do that. It's not like I wanted to. I had to." She'd _wanted_ to say a thousand things, to ask why he had such dark circles under his eyes and was he getting enough sleep and had Mom remembered it was time to harvest the chamomile out in the garden, who was working the flower shop, did Grandma actually think all those terrible things she'd said, had her little cousin Ryu gotten over his pneumonia?

"So why were you two so pigheaded?" Sakura said in utter confusion.

For once, Ino let the 'pig' thing slide. She didn't have the energy to bite back, and anyway Sakura only wanted all the arguing to be over for her. "It's a Yamanaka thing," was the best she could come up with. It was a paltry and incomplete explanation, but it was the closest she could get to the truth: that Ino was proud and her father was proud and everything was so fucked up that she couldn't possibly see a way back to normal anymore. Her goal at the moment was just to survive. Really she was hurting so deeply that she'd lashed out to keep from snapping like a dried out twig. Undoubtedly her father was too, if only because his plan to protect the heir of his clan had backfired spectacularly. Of course he hadn't thought she'd actually sign the clan expulsion paperwork, he'd only submitted it as a threat to force her home. For someone who'd taught her her everything she knew, it was almost as if he didn't understand her at all.

Sakura mulled that over for a while, following Ino part of the way home, then, just before veering off towards the hospital, she said quietly, "You're not on hospital staff anymore but we get a lot of little things that need done, general stuff. I can recommend you for our D and C rank missions if you like, when we submit the papers."

It was understanding and support in two sentences, and Ino smiled. "That'd be cool, Forehead. Hey, how'd the mission go?"

"Boring as usual," Sakura sighed. "Pig." They traded a few more insults and parted, and Ino's steps were ever so slightly lighter as she tromped up the dirty steps to her apartment.

Shikamaru was there, snoozing on her couch. She dropped down beside him with a weary sigh, uncaring that she was shedding little flecks of dried cement everywhere, and wriggled gratefully under the arm he lifted.

"You need to set more traps in this place," he mumbled sleepily. In Shika talk, that meant something like, "I'm glad our Hokage didn't throw you through the wall."

"You need to stop smoking, you stink," she said back, which really meant, "Me too and also thank you for everything lately."

"Hmm," he said, and they dozed for a little while, until Chouji, freshly out of the hospital, popped in, bearing an absolute mountain of take-out, and then they feasted.

"I'm falling apart," Ino said experimentally to her echoing apartment after they left. "I was mean to my daddy today and I hated it, and I don't have any family anymore." Her walls remained frustratingly blank. Perhaps she'd ask Sai for some of his art to spice things up.


	5. Chapter 5

Being entirely loaded down with groceries, Ino wasn't exactly at her most stable when a blurry little whirlwind of dark hair crashed into her knees, but she managed not to topple entirely over.

The whirlwind giggled. Ino peered down, eyebrows raised. "Why, Takako Sarutobi, is that you running around like a wildwoman?" She was greeted with a gummy smile from the tot clamped onto her legs with all four limbs; it was quite possibly the cutest thing she'd ever seen, even beating out Akamaru's last batch of puppies. "You've got good timing, kid," she said fondly, setting her basket down to detach the child. Takako only gripped tighter with astonishing strength. "If I didn't know your parents I'd say you were part octopus," Ino mumbled.

Right on cue, Kurenai appeared from around a display of loaves. "Hello, Ino," she murmured, eyeing her daughter. "Sorry about that. She's gotten so fast recently, I swear, if I dare to blink she's gone."

Ino laughed and finally managed to pry Takako off her knees and swoop her up into her arms. "That's how they are, you pretty much need a leash for them once they figure out the toddling thing," she said, puffing out her cheeks like a squirrel and going cross eyed, which sent Takako into more hysterical laughter. Ino'd always been good with kids. She'd generally been the one who volunteered to watch her little cousins at family picnics, and Takako in particular held a very large piece of her heart. "How've you been, Kurenai? Shikamaru updates me regularly on _her_-" she hefted the little one higher on her hip- "But he doesn't say much about you. You should come to lunch with all of us one of these days."

Kurenai laughed and set her own grocery basket down, lifting Takako gracefully out of Ino's arms. "That would be nice, actually."

"Yeah?" Ino said hesitantly. She'd always felt vaguely awkward around the incredibly gorgeous, talented Kurenai, like she was suddenly all elbows and knees and zits.

That was silly, though. Kurenai was one of the kindest people in Konoha, and she just smiled at Ino, patting down a stray lock of Takako's hair. "Yeah. Definitely. Just let me know, okay?"

"Okay. Will do." Ino shifted uneasily for a moment, wondering if she was supposed to keep talking or just say her polite goodbyes to this woman whom she hardly knew, but who was so irrevocably woven up in her past and her future. "Well, I'll just let you get back to shopping," she said at last, and Kurenai nodded graciously. Ino noticed that there was a tired sort of droop around Kurenai's eyes, a sag to her shoulders, and it was even more than could be expected in a single mother. She was missing Asuma too. They smiled at each other hesitantly and then left, both thinking of the same man, Ino fiddling absently with one of her earrings.

So, after that mostly nice, if unexpected, little interlude with the sort-of widow of her murdered sensi, Ino was definitely lost in her own head when she started wandering home, discount groceries in her arms.

She certainly wasn't at all prepared for Akamaru to come barrelling out of a shadowy alley and send her toppling down to the ground, her groceries flying spectacularly across the street. "No! Down! Down! Bad dog! Oh, god, you're filthy!" She flailed, gasping; having a gigantic thing like Akamaru sitting on her stomach was doing nothing good for her breathing. His fluffy, pinkish, filthy fur just absorbed her blows, though. "Damn mutt!"

Kiba strolled nonchalantly out of the alley and grinned down at her. She bared her teeth at him. "Hey, Ino," he said brightly. "What's up?"

"I'm going to do things to you that are more painful than anything you've ever imagined in your darkest nightmares," she threatened airlessly.

"Aw. You know I love it when you talk dirty to me, but I think right now I'd rather hear you begging for mercy." He folded his arms and waggled his eyebrows.

She hissed at him. He didn't budge, but Akamaru gave a soft whuff and she screamed as she felt a fat glob of dog drool splat onto her cheek. "Akamaru! Down, boy! Down! Heel! Off! Go! Doggie want a treat?"

It was useless. Akamaru only panted softly from his perch atop her slowly collapsing ribs, tongue lolling out and looking very pleased with himself and the world in general. "Who's a good boy," Kiba crooned merrily. "Who's a good dog who just got back from rolling in the mud!"

"Mud won't get the pink out," Ino squeaked in fury, trying to sneakily bring her hands together to form a jutsu; Akamaru pushed one of her wrists down easily with a massive paw and she groaned, foiled.

Kiba scowled a little. "This is _swamp_ mud and now you're covered too. You're gonna stink to high heaven. Now tell me how to turn my dog back to his normal color! Everyone else at the kennels keeps making fun of him! Even _Shino _said he looked dumb!"

"How tragic," she gasped, thrashing uselessly. "I think it suits him." God, it really was swamp mud all over Akamaru. She could smell it now and it was _not _pleasant.

Kiba only grunted and made a motion with his hand; Akamaru lowered his head and gave her a great, sloppy lick up the entire side of her face. She shrieked. The few bystanders in the street walked faster, glancing over their shoulders nervously. Kiba looked deeply satisfied. "I have a mission later today and I am _not _bringing a pink dog along with me," he informed her.

"No dice," Ino wheezed, trying to bite Akamaru's leg in desperation. The dog only panted down at her good-naturedly, dark eyes shining.

Kiba raised a hand, obviously ready to send Akamaru in with another tongue attack. "Tell me how to get it out or Akamaru here is going to find every nasty, rotten dead animal within ten miles of the village walls, roll in it, and then come find you for more cuddle time. You'll think swamp mud smells like freaking roses by the time I'm done with you."

"Ass," she croaked angrily, wondering if her face was as blue as it felt. "Fine!" Akamaru immediately jumped off her with a wag of his tail and she coughed, sucking in air and trying to swipe drool and mud off herself at the same time. "Give him another bath. Use hot water and four or five cans of tomato juice," she told Kiba. Then she took another look at Akamaru, who was looming hugely beside Kiba, like some kind of legendary wolf god. "Uh. Maybe more like ten cans."

"Tomato juice? You must seriously think I'm stupid."

"I do, yes, and thanks for destroying like _half _my food budget for the month-" Nothing like a good guilt trip- "But it's the same thing that people use if their pets get skunked. The tomatoes are really acidic. They open up the hair follicle without hurting the skin. It should get the dye right out. It's actually stronger than the stuff they're allowed to put in regular shampoos."

He squinted at her suspiciously. "Really? Then why haven't I heard of it?"

She rolled her eyes. "Nindogs usually aren't dumb enough to get skunked, you moron."

"Oh."

She started gathering up her groceries, making sure to look as pathetic as possible. Kiba, who was a really perfect example of what could happen to a boy when his mother was a fearsome dictator that liked the men in her life trained down to the toenails, twitched uncomfortably at the sight of her when she stood up, arms loaded down; he'd always been the type to open doors and the like, oddly enough, considering how dirty he'd just played. "I'll get you for this," she said, but she let it come out half-hearted. If he thought she was beaten, he'd be unprepared for the truly vicious counterattack she was going to go home and plot right this second.

"Yeah, yeah," he mumbled, his victory obviously soured, wandering away in the direction of the grocery store, Akamaru tagging faithfully at his heels.

She smiled to herself once he was out of sight, putting the rest of her salvageable food in her bag. If he thought Akamaru was pink now, well, tomato juice on a pure white dog would only make things even better. Nobody could turn a defeat into a sneaky, underhanded win like Ino Yamanaka.

She hummed evilly all the way home, stinky swamp mud or not.

* * *

"You could hypnotize a bunch of cats to follow him around. There's nothing more annoying than a bunch of cats yowling at night while you're trying to sleep. Plus they piss on everything and it really smells bad."

"Tenten, you're an evil genius," Sakura said, with what sounded like real fear.

"I know." The evil genius in question waggled her eyebrows and took another big bite of her dango.

Hinata frowned a little. "How do you know who's won?"

"What do you mean? I've won when he's in tears," Ino said, grinning a little; it must have been disturbing, because Tenten and Sakura both leaned away.

"He is my teammate," Hinata said softly into her teacup. "I feel like I should tell you to be gentle, Ino."

"But you're not. Because you know it would be useless." Ino grinned harder. "I really like the cat thing. That's got serious potential."

"Do it with dragonflies," Hinata murmured. All the girls stared at her; she flushed. "He's kind of, ah, scared of them."

"You dated a guy who's scared of dragonflies?" Sakura snickered. Ino tried halfheartedly to skewer Sakura's hand to the table with her dango stick, which provoked a skeptical frown from Tenten, who disapproved on principal of makeshift, wannabe weapons of any kind.

"I didn't know that when I dated him," Ino said irritably. "Why is he scared of dragonflies?"

Hinata shrugged and took a dainty sip of her tea, looking every inch the polished clan heiress, even in her well-worn jacket. For a crazy moment, Ino actually felt a little envious, at least until she remembered that the Hyuuga were even nuttier than the Yamanakas. "He says they're big and they have creepy eyes. We found it out during a dinner at Shino's a long time ago." She giggled a little, demurely behind one hand, of course. "One of his cousins breeds them for spy missions."

Sakura started wheezing. "I keep picturing big scary Kiba running from dragonflies now," she cackled, clutching her ribs and nearly knocking Tenten's teacup over.

"You couldn't have told me this while I was dating him, Hinata?" Ino said mournfully, thinking of all the torture opportunities she'd missed out on.

"Sorry," Hinata said, though she didn't sound sorry at all. In fact she looked mildly self-satisfied under the pink still on her cheeks, which was a very unusual emotion for Hinata to show at all. She even managed to stir a spoonful of honey into her tea in a vaguely smug way. It had to be a Hyuuga thing; that tightlipped family probably had entire conversations using nothing but their cutlery and various aristocratic glares. God knew Neji could practically write a novel with his eyebrows. If he weren't so good looking it would almost make Ino feel sorry for Tenten.

Though Ino supposed Hinata was probably right not to have exposed her teammate's hysterical weakness way before this. It wasn't as if Ino went around telling everyone that Shika had slept with a night light until he was eight, and she'd burn the village down if her boys ever mentioned Mr. Fofo the bear to anyone. It was just being a good teammate, really. Ino sucked on her dango stick and gave more serious thought to the dragonfly problem, trying to figure out how on earth she could turn her ex into bug bait, but then she slapped her knee as she remembered something. "Ooh! I ran into Kurenai and the baby the other day. Why didn't you tell me Takako's getting so big? She practically tackled me. She's gorgeous."

The way Hinata's pretty face brightened at the mention of her sensei's daughter was like a morning glory in the sun. "Isn't she the prettiest baby you've ever seen? Kurenai did tell me, though. She said you invited her for dinner."

"Well, I figured, you know, she's sort of honorary family, or whatever. Shika's always talking about her, anyway, he babysits all the time."

"Yes. You know, I think she'd like hearing that."

"The kid looks a lot like Asuma," Tenten said, and then she promptly choked on her mint tea. Sakura descended immediately with glowing green hands, smacking her on the back so hard that Ino wouldn't have been surprised to hear Tenten's spine snap, and at least six senbon popped out of her buns and clattered to the table, but it did stop her coughing fit. "Shit- ow! Ino, I am so sorry," Tenten gasped guiltily, once she could talk again.

Everyone looked ridiculously uncomfortable, and Hinata's face was edging from its standard pink to mortified red. "Hmm?" said Ino dreamily, fixing her eyes out the window of the teahouse. "Did you say something?" God knew she needed gossip time after all the crap that had been happening to her lately. There was no way in hell she'd let the first nice lunch out with her girls she'd had in weeks- not to mention, the first time she'd splurged on _lunch _in about as long, which she was currently feeling more than a little guilty over- be ruined by something that a good ninja would be over by now anyway. Distraction was the only option, and it was her lucky day in that department, it seemed.

Sakura's eyes narrowed, and when she followed the direction of Ino's gaze, she let out an outraged squawk and smacked her palm down so hard she cracked the table. "You're staring at my sensei's ass _again_," she shouted. The elderly couple seated at the table behind her stiffened visibly.

Ino flapped a hand lazily, still staring out the window at Kakashi, who really had wonderful timing. If he hadn't been out there she would've had to pretend to be staring at Naruto's butt, and that would just be weird. "So? He's got a nice one. Don't tell me you don't sneak peeks at it when you're on missions and he's leading the way," she teased.

She might have gotten away unscathed if she hadn't thrown in a lecherous wink that apparently pushed Sakura over the edge.

Ten minutes later, having been chased out of the teashop by a shrieking crone with a broom for causing a scene, they all collapsed on the grass in the little park around the corner, gasping. Hinata was still red, but she was giggling, whereas two years ago she would have fainted dead away long ago from embarrassment. Tenten was laughing outright, and Sakura was still pretending to stew angrily, but Ino didn't miss the hint of amusement on her face. Sure enough, when she flip-flopped over to drape herself across Sakura's lap, the other girl didn't send her flying across the whole of Fire country.

"So what the heck did Kiba _do _to you?" Tenten said when she'd stopped laughing. "Last I heard, you two were going strong, and then I come back from that one awful Grass mission and suddenly it's Shinobi World War Four in the streets and half his head's shaved."

"Oh, god." Ino pushed her face into the Sakura's arm. "I don't think I can tell you guys."

"Why not?" they all clamored.

"He's Hinata's teammate! Plus it's embarrassing." Sakura's eyes lit up greedily, and Ino hastened to clarify. "For him, not me. It just pissed me off, and then he was a dick about it, and then he put salt in my tea and it all just sort of escalated from there. I mean, I don't think we'd have lasted much longer anyway, but it was the final straw!"

Tenten put a hand on Ino's shoulder and said, in a very solemn, serious way that completely belied the mirth in her voice, "I swear by all my wonderful, sharp, pointy things that whatever you tell us will never leave the- uh, park."

"Yeah! I swear by my lucky pink scrub cap," Sakura chimed in, plucking a leaf off Ino's leg and crumpling it to dust.

Hinata was silent, fiddling with the edge of her shirt. "Uh…"

"Come on!" Tenten wheedled, sparkling in an uncomfortably Gai-like way.

"It's only that Ino tends to say these _things _that I can't forget. Even if I really want to," Hinata squeaked miserably, with just a trace of her old stutter, which meant she was _really _worried about exposure to possible impropriety.

Ino sighed dramatically and threw a hand over her eyes, unable to totally tarnish Hinata's adorable innocence, despite how hilarious the abstract concept of corrupting the Hyuuga heiress was. Hinata had a sort of sweet trust about her that was really unusual in a ninja; Ino believed rare people like that should be mildly mocked on occasion, but mostly protected. "It's too shameful. The memory might send me into the depths of insanity if I bring it up. I'm sorry, you guys, I just can't. It will forever live in infamy in the darkest depths of my min- mmf!" She sputtered against Sakura's palm.

Ooh, Sakura thought she could roll her eyes, did she? Ino, taking a page from Akamaru's book, licked her friend's palm sloppily and was rewarded with an ear-shattering squeal of disgust. She did have to dodge a pretty fast right hook, but it was totally worth it.

Tenten snorted and got to her feet, twisting her neck from side to side until it popped audibly. "I can never tell if you guys hate each other or not. I gotta go."

"Afternoon training? Again?" Sakura said, raising a brow. "Gai's worse than Tsunade."

"No one's worse than Tsunade," Ino said darkly. She only had four hours until her appointment to help her dad with the interrogation of the prisoner.

Apparently Ibiki liked to do most of his work at night. She hadn't dared ask why.

"I've got to go too," Hinata said. "This was fun. We should do it again next time we're all home at the same time."

"Definitely. Bye!"

"Later!" Sakura and Ino both waved as the other two left and then they settled back in a boneless heap to snooze a little.

"Gonna tell me what he did?" Sakura mumbled after a bit, yawning between words. "I could really use something funny right now."

"Oh." Ino cracked an eye and regarded Sakura, who was wearing the particular wrinkles on her forehead that spoke of very specific, Sasuke-related fretting. That sighting of him a few weeks ago must still be bothering her, understandably. "Don't laugh too hard, okay? And you can't tell _anyone _no matter what_. _I'm not out to totally ruin his life forever. I just want him a little miserable."

"Promise. Pinky swear."

"He jizzed in my eye."

"Oh my _god,_ Pig! _Ew!"_

* * *

The corridors of Ibiki's torture lair were long and winding, and the sinister, crew-cut ninja leading her through them was eerily silent to the point that it was disturbing, but other than that, Interrogation headquarters weren't nearly as spooky as Ino had always imagined. The walls were a sterile white and the offices they passed looked not unlike the ones in the Hokage's tower. They even passed a female ninja who had an armful of paperwork; she gave Ino a curious glance as she nodded to the guy leading her, but it was all very mundane, almost disappointingly so.

"I thought there'd be more screaming," she ventured.

"Torture level's soundproofed," Quiet Creeper said brusquely, managing to look even grumpier despite the fact that he was finally actually talking.

"Oh. Makes sense." She dropped the end of her ponytail when she realized that she was fiddling with it. Should she have tied it up? Would it get all bloody? Blood was _hard_ to get out of hair once it dried. At least she'd had the sense to wear those gray boots from her mission with Chouji. If those got bloodstained, well, it was no great loss. It wasn't like she'd never had to scrub blood out of her stuff before, anyway. Asuma's blood in particular had been stubborn and-

"Take it easy," Quiet Creeper mumbled, glancing at her sideways and hunching his neck into his jounin vest as if simply _talking _pained him.

"I'm easy," she said at once, a bit defensively, dropping the ponytail she'd somehow picked up again. "I'm totally easy!" His lips twitched and one eyebrow shot up. She sighed and slapped her palm to her forehead. "Damn! I mean, uh, you know. I'm fine. I'm not nervous." The eyebrow stayed up. "I'm not _that _nervous."

He still didn't say anything, he just nodded and kept walking. Ino clamped her jaw shut before she could say anything else stupid.

Eventually he ushered her down a flight of stairs and into a door that, to her, looked just the same as all the others they'd passed, except there was her father, arms crossed and looking rather irritated.

"Have fun," Quiet Creeper told her before wandering off.

Ino and her father stared at each other for a moment. It wasn't until she saw the picture of her mother on the desk that she realized this must be his office. It was amazingly bare and empty. When he didn't say anything, she shut the door behind her and said, "Hello. I believe I'm here to help interrogate a man?" She started chewing on her tongue and arranged her arms in a forcibly casual manner.

His blue glare intensified. "Come on, then. You should see what you've done."

More doors, more stairs down, and slowly the walls turned from white to dingy gray around her as she stared at his broad back. Eventually they started passing iron doors, bars scribed heavily with chakra suppressing seals, and when her father finally opened one, it squealed.

Umeko's father was skeletal, yellowed skin taut and moist eyes darting every which way. Severely sunburned skin was bubbling in strips off his cheekbones. He was bound only by a single manacle around one ankle, which told Ino more than she really wanted to know about just how effective her stolen jutsu had been.

"Where's my daughter," he croaked. Ino put a hand tightly over her mouth. "Baby? Oh, no, honey, are you okay? Where…" he paused to lick his lips. "Where is she? Where… Umeko?" He didn't react to their entrance in any way at all.

"His voice is so rough because he's been talking almost nonstop for days now," Inoichi said from behind her; she only just stopped herself from jumping. She'd been so trapped in the horror before her that she'd nearly forgotten she wasn't alone.

She'd be puking her guts out right now if she hadn't guilted Sakura into giving her some anti-nausea medication earlier. The stuff had tasted terrible and been expired- the only reason Sakura had had it at all- but it worked, and right now Ino felt only like she might pass out, instead of feeling like she'd puke and then pass out in her own vomit.

"This is a joke," she forced out. In the distance, someone shouted gibberish.

Her father sighed and one hand twitched like he might be about to put it on her shoulder. She was both disappointed and relieved when he didn't. "Yes. There's no interrogation possible. His brain is too damaged. Even I can't go in there and find anything remotely useful. You performed the jutsu very well."

"Oh, wonderful," she mumbled, swallowing acidic spit and propping her hands on her knees as her victim mumbled tragic nonsense. "So Tsunade just wanted to rub my face in it. Well, mission successful. I get it, okay? I won't use this jutsu again."

Her father shrugged uncomfortably. "I said that too. Once you've learned a jutsu, though, it's pretty hard to forget it, especially if someone's coming at you with a kunai."

"Right." Ino pushed suddenly sweaty bangs out of her face. "Can I go now? I'm sure the Hokage will heap more punishment on me for screwing this up, you don't need to worry."

"Oh, okay, I won't worry about this damn village quarantine decimating our profits this quarter. My men don't need paychecks or anything. Silly me."

Ino rolled her eyes. "Whine, whine, Dad, you know-" They realized at the same time how dangerously close to familiar they'd fallen, and Ino's mouth snapped shut so fast her teeth clicked.

Inoichi was looking very deliberately off into the middle distance, but his jaw was clenched.

"I learned pretty recently that paychecks are totally _not _overrated," Ino said hoarsely. "So I'll do whatever I can to help with finding whoever's behind the ambushes and how they got their information."

He looked at her then, and his hand twitched again. "Oh?"

"Yes. It's only because I care about the village, though."

"Of course." He looked amused, but not quite enough that she could justify a screaming tantrum. It was a shame because the sound of the prisoner's moans was making a mild breakdown look better by the second.

She turned to look again at Umeko's father, who was reaching dizzily into space towards nothing, mouth working emptily, drooling slightly. He shifted and she heard a strange rustle; when she realized he was wearing a diaper, she had to sag against the wall to stay upright. Her jutsu had taken all of ten seconds, and yet it had done all of this. "Should I…?"

She heard her father's boots shift on the concrete behind her. "He's slated for execution tomorrow at noon. The medics are going to come in and do one last check to make sure there's no hope, but that's only for the paperwork."

"Oh." Thank god she wasn't going to have to kill the man in cold blood. She wasn't even sure she could, honestly. "So can I go?"

"Yes."

"Are you guys going to take me to court for the jutsu?"

"We haven't decided yet."

She swallowed. "Do you want to?"

He frowned. She tried to read him, then gave up. "I haven't decided yet, honestly. I never thought you'd do something like that. I never thought you'd make any of the choices you have lately."

Ouch. Parental disappointment, sharper than any kunai and more deadly than Orochimaru in a pissy mood. Ino cringed and, to her horror, felt her face heat up. As soon as she opened her mouth to defend herself or possibly beg for forgiveness, she felt the telltale tightness of oncoming tears squeezing her throat and had to swallow twice before she could squeak, "I'm gonna go, then."

It was extremely awkward, because she had to stand and wait- patiently, definitely not sulking or anything- while her father relocked the cell, and then she had to follow him out of the giant maze to freedom. It was even more awkward when they emerged into the cool evening air and had to stammer uncomfortable, stilted good-byes before each taking off in the opposite direction.

She kept her feet on the ground, but her dad took to the rooftops, which he never did unless he was late for lunch or upset.

* * *

"You're even worse today. I'm impressed. I didn't think you could go backwards so fast."

"Shut it, you stupid paintbrush boy." Sai opened his mouth like he was going to say something else, but then he took another look at her face and was quiet, bending easily away from her next kick. Probably being around Sakura had made him at least understand when a woman was truly out for blood.

They kept sparring until she was dripping sweat, even in the early morning cool. When she could barely even lift her arm anymore to block him, he called it a draw, with very impressive diplomatic skill that she wouldn't have expected from him, and suggested she work more on the boiling-blood jutsu.

"You haven't taught me any genjutsu," she pointed out crankily, once they were sitting beside the stream again.

"You're a Yamanaka. I'd assumed you had all the mind tricks you might need."

"Mm. True, very true. I am pretty good at mind games."

"Pretty bad at chakra control, though," he said cheerfully.

"Well, I'm sorry I'm not Sakura the Great, okay!" She flung the bubble of water between her hands at him in a fit of temper, and much to her surprise, actually hit him.

"Sakura gets even angrier if I dodge her blows. I've learned to let her connect sometimes," he explained, when she looked stunned. Then he went about shaking his wet hair and managing to seem so hangdog and pathetic, even without a proper expression on his face, that she started to feel a little bad.

It passed promptly when he started mocking her hand seal speed. "You're a horrible teacher," she informed him, snarling a little. She was walking a tightrope and the ground below was full of blood and crying fathers, and she really wasn't in the mood to be mocked.

He splashed his bare feet in the water uncaringly. "Objectively, you've already improved in both agility and speed, which I think would imply I'm actually a rather good teacher. Unless you have a sensei on the side? But I think that would be rather scandalous of you."

She gaped at him. "Sai, did you just make a joke that wasn't about dicks?"

He said nothing, only ducked his head, but she caught the faintest hint of color on his pale cheeks and descended into shocked silence, steaming water burbling and swirling between her hands. "Well," she said at last, pleased for reasons she couldn't quite name, even in spite of her aching limbs and bruised pride, "Since I'm taking all the credit for you making that joke, of course, then it means I'm a fabulous teacher too."

He looked at her sideways, doing that odd crinkle thing with his eyebrows again. "You'll still die far too easily on the battlefield to be of much use to Konoha."

"Excuse me?"

Sai leaned toward the water a little and said, very seriously, with a hint of tension around his mouth, as if he perhaps wanted to smile, "Ah, it's only the truth."

The bubble of water held between her hands steamed entirely away in an instant. "You- you insensitive jackass! At least I would never end up alone because I can't even talk to normal people without creeping them out! At least I have friends instead of people who just put up with me!"

He stared at her with those devouring, empty eyes. She put a hand over her mouth, then said, "Sai, shit, that came out wrong!"

"Did it," he said, not quite a question, and now his eyebrows were crinkling hard. While she was hunting for the right words to say, he got up and left, holding his boots and leaving a trail of fading wet footprints on the ground.

She put her head in her hands. It didn't occur to her for a good five minutes that she'd managed, in her anger, to heat the water perfectly.

"The dirty sneak," she said aloud, and then, irritated beyond all belief at being manipulated so neatly, she went Sai hunting.

Her search took her from the Hokage tower, to Ichiraku's, through the south marketplace and past all the big ninja apartment buildings. He was nowhere to be found. Ino was reaching the point of sheer fury, complete with hair pulling and gnashing teeth, when she spotted Sakura's sensei loitering outside a bookstore.

She targeted him at once, trotting over. "Kakashi! Hey!"

He squinted at her warily. "Ino. Hello?"

"I need a-" If she said the word 'favor' the man would be gone in a puff of smoke faster than she could say, "One-eyed lazy pervert." She took another tack, putting on her best smile, which only made the man look more suspicious. "A helping hand. See, Sai's got a bit of a cold, and I wanted to bring him some of my herbal cough drops, but I can't find his house!"

Kakashi fixed her with a glare that was truly astonishing in its sheer dislike, especially coming from only a quarter of a face. "Are you plotting to despoil my poor teammate?"

Ino planted her hands on her hips. "Just because some people haven't done any despoiling of their own in so long that they have to resort to pornography doesn't mean I'm automatically out to mount every cute guy I see!"

"I'd forgotten how loud you can get," Kakashi observed, staring longingly through the window of the bookstore.

Ino sighed and mentally awarded Sakura fifty points for ever putting up with a man this insane. "I'm trying to do something nice. That's rare for me. Like, very rare. Help me. Do the right thing." He only lifted his book a little higher in front of his face and mumbled something incoherent. She eyed him consideringly. "Normally you'd have bolted by now. What's up?"

He was as motionless as a statue. "Nothing," he said coolly. Then he lowered his book a tad and awarded her with a charming eye-crinkle. "Maybe I just like your company, Ino."

The left-field compliment only threw her for a moment; it was a tactic that Shikamaru, too, liked use on her, but he was wise enough to reserve it for truly desperate situations. "As if," she said rudely. "I'm loud, pushy, and proudly female, which are like the top three things you hate, other than society in general. You're lurking for a reason."

"Nuh uh," Kakashi retorted childishly, narrowing his eye at her.

"New Icha Icha on the way?" she guessed.

Kakashi actually looked genuinely mournful. "Noooo."

Suddenly Ino remembered Jiraiya's passing. "Ooh, crap. My bad. Really."

"Mm." The infuriating man was back to ignoring her, to all appearances engrossed in his book.

She circled him like a wolf around a wounded doe, aware of his subtle stiffening but uncaring; whatever vice he had incoming to that bookstore, he'd already proved he wasn't leaving without it. "You don't even know where he lives," she decided, after taking an inventory of Kakashi's hunched shoulders, drooping posture- well, droopier than normal- and curled toes.

"Of course I know where he lives," Kakashi laughed. "I'm his team leader. Which is why I'm doing my job, protecting him from things like you."

Ino sniffed. "Yes, yes, I go bump in the night, blah blah. I'm much kinder than Sakura, anyway, and Sai deals with her all the time!"

Kakashi actually closed his book to look at her disbelievingly. She resolved to take notes; for a man working with one eye and half a personality, he was very skilled at conveying things.

Finally, after trying and failing to stare him down, Ino grunted and said bad-temperedly, "I owe him an apology, okay?"

"Ah, and the sky's pink," Kakashi said placidly, turning the page and presenting her with his shoulder.

"I was right! You don't know where he lives!" she said triumphantly. "Some team leader you are!"

He looked at her again, and this time his expression made her think somehow she'd already managed to put her foot in her mouth again. Twice in one day; a record for her normally shameless self. She kept the bluff up, though, with a taunting, triumphant smile on her face, and at last he closed his book and rubbed his temples. "Do you really have an apology to give? You're not going to go steal his soul or anything?"

"I really do owe him one," she said promptly, sensing victory. "He's been helping me train and I was a bit of a bitch."

"No," Kakashi said dryly. "You? I just can't believe that, but… Fine. I'll send Pakkun to track Sai. Goodness knows the boy needs as many friends as he can get. They're important."

He sounded entirely genuine about the last bit, so she went with the truth and told him, "I do like Sai. Usually. About half the time. I like him when he's not talking, you know?" Now that he'd stopped calling her gorgeous all the time, his talking was generally much less entertaining.

"Too well." Kakashi chomped down on his thumb and had an adorable little pug summoned in five seconds flat. Ino sidled a little bit away; small or not, she'd had enough of dogs lately to last her for a lifetime.

Kakashi crouched down, slipping his book into his back pouch. "Hi, Pakkun. Remember the dark-haired kid on my team?"

"The one that was always throwing tantrums or the one with the ink?"

"The ink one. Can you track him down for my friend here?"

There was a healthy dose of sarcasm in the word 'friend', but Ino decided to ignore it. She waved at the pug. "Hello. I'm Ino."

He came over and snuffled at her ankles. "You smell different than you used to. New soap?"

"You remember me?" she said, surprised.

"From the time we all tangled with the tentacle man and the immortal one," he grunted, ears flopping as he shook his head. "And I never forget a smell even if I don't much know the face."

"That's very cool," she said honestly.

"Ino here is going to stuff you full of delicious doggy treats as a thank you," Kakashi said happily, tilting his head.

"Ah, thanks, that's real nice of you, lady. Shall we go?"

The man even managed to foist the bill for his summon's dinner off onto someone else. She fixed Kakashi with a steady glower for five full seconds before telling Pakkun, "Sure." There was a whooshing sound, dust blew up into her eyes, and as she staggered about screeching, there came the sound of Kakashi's laughter.

"Better hurry and catch up. Pakkun's fast," he said.

"You're every bit the jackass Sakura says you are," she screamed before leaping onto the bookstore's roof and hurtling off in the direction of the small brown blur she could just barely see in the distance. Kakashi's unholy giggles drifted after her.

* * *

A/N: much thanks to the peerless professor-maka for being my beta! seriously, she's fantastic, she's improved my writing so much ;) thanks proma!


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